This year sakura season felt like a personal affront. The delicate clouds of blossoms burst forth for a few fleeting days, a reminder to savor the present, to live in the now. The notion is called wabi-sabi: life, like the cherry blossom, it is beautiful because of its impermanence, not in spite of it, more exquisite for the inevitability of loss. Well, I thought bitterly, that and eight Hundred yen would buy me a cup of green tea.
A couple of hundred centuries ago, watching the blooms was the sacred pastime of nobility. Now ubiquitous ohanami, or blossom viewings, are mostly an excuse to par-tay. The hot ohanami spot in Hiroshima was the Peace Park, a greenway built beneath the hypocenter of the explosion, filled with memorial shrines, a museum, and a burial mound. Despite its gravitas, it was a cheerful spot for an outing, with a canopy of pink and white blossoms lining the riverbanks.
Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother
by Peggy Orenstein
Waiting for Daisy is about loss, love, anger and redemption. It’s about doing all the things you swore you’d never do to get something you hadn’t even been sure you wanted. It’s about being a woman in a confusing, contradictory time. It’s about testing the limits of a loving marriage. And it’s about trying (and trying and trying) to have a baby.
Orenstein’s story begins when she tells her new husband that she’s not sure she ever wants to be a mother; it ends six years later after she’s done almost everything humanly possible to achieve that goal, from “fertility sex” to escalating infertility treatments to New Age remedies to forays into international adoption. Her saga unfolds just as professional women are warned by the media to heed the ticking of their biological clocks, and just as fertility clinics have become a boom industry, with over two million women a year seeking them out. Buffeted by one jaw-dropping obstacle after another, Orenstein seeks answers both medical and spiritual in America and Asia, along the way visiting an old flame who’s now the father of fifteen, and discovering in Japan a ritual of surprising solace. All the while she tries to hold onto a marriage threatened by cycles, appointments, procedures and disappointments. Waiting for Daisy is an honest, wryly funny report from the front, an intimate page-turner that illuminates the ambivalence, obsession, and sacrifice that characterize so many modern women’s lives.
**
7. Cherry Blossom Hearts