April arrived the way it always did — with the specific audacity of a season that had been waiting and had decided waiting was finished.
The cherry blossoms came on a Thursday, which Hana noted was an appropriately decisive day for a decisive event. By Saturday the street outside the household's windows was doing what it did for approximately ten days every year — the extravagant, temporary, completely committed thing that made people stop on pavements and look up, reminded against their will that beauty was not always subtle.
Nana stood at the kitchen window on Saturday morning and watched the petals move in the light wind off the nearest tree — the neighbor's, not theirs, but close enough to feel like theirs — and felt the specific quality of April in her body alongside everything else April was doing this year.
She was sixteen weeks.
