The cherry tree near the dojo path had opened while Carlos was not looking.
On Monday it had been a tree with tight brown buds. On Tuesday it had been a tree with pale pink surprises. By Sunday, petals were falling before Carlos could count them.
“One, two, three—wait, that one landed already. One, two, four? No, that cannot be right.”
Carlos stood under the branches with his practice bag bumping his knee and one finger raised in the air. A petal landed on his sleeve. Another landed on the strap of his bag. Three more slipped past his counting finger as if they had somewhere else to be.
A sparrow watched from a branch above him. It did not count. It shook one foot to scratch its head, knocked loose two petals, and seemed completely untroubled by ruining Carlos’ count.
“Excuse me,” Carlos said to the sparrow. “I was using those.”
“Maybe they did not know they were part of a math lesson,” Auntie Mariko said.
Carlos turned. Auntie Mariko stood near the path with a folded cloth bag over one arm. A few petals rested on her shoulder. She did not brush them away.
“I was trying to count how many fell,” Carlos said. “But they keep changing the answer.”
“Cherry blossoms are not very good at staying where anyone insists they be,” Auntie Mariko said.
Carlos looked up at the branches. More petals loosened, turned once in the air, and landed wherever they wanted: on the path, in the grass, on the roof of the shoe shelf, and once on Carlos’ nose.
He blew upward. The petal did not move. Auntie Mariko lent him a smile instead of help.
“What happens,” she asked, “if you stop counting for one minute and only look?”
Carlos did not like abandoning an established counting before it had been properly defeated. But he lowered his precision counting finger.
At first, he saw fewer things because he was not busy chasing all of them. Then he saw more. Petals rested in the grass. Petals danced along the stepping stones, taking a rest in the wider cracks. Petals hung in the tree, still attached for now. A few petals were already brown at the edges. Some were gone before he knew where they had landed.
“There are more kinds of falling than I thought,” Carlos said.
“And more kinds of seeing,” Auntie Mariko said.
Before they entered the dojo, Auntie Mariko asked the students to stand under the cherry tree for one quiet minute and a photo.
Carlos expected the one minute to feel long. It did not. A petal slid down the front of his practice bag. Another caught in Mateo’s hair. One landed on the wooden step, stayed there for two breaths, and then lifted away when the breeze changed.
“Observation first,” Auntie Mariko said. “Practice can begin before we step inside.”
Carlos bowed at the entrance with one petal still stuck to his sleeve. He did not brush it away. He wanted to see how long it would stay, but he also knew that watching the petal too closely might make him miss the floor, the bow rack, and the people waiting behind him.
Inside, the dojo smelled faintly of clean wood and spring air. A few petals had followed everyone in and rested near the doorway. Obaasan Emi would probably notice them later for the foreign contaminant they were. Carlos hoped she would not think the cherry tree had poor manners leaving petals to intrude.
When Carlos stepped to the line, he remembered intention without calling attention to it. He began carefully. Ashibumi placed his feet. Dozukuri built his body. Yugamae prepared his hands and eyes.
Near the open doorway, a petal turned in the air and landed on the threshold. Carlos saw it, then let it be there; recognizing this was not its time.
Uchiokoshi raised the bow. Hikiwake opened him slowly. In Kai, Carlos noticed something different. The moment did not stay still just because he wanted to keep it. His hands were steady, but his breath moved. The bow held its curve, but the string still carried tension. The petal on his sleeve trembled once.
For one tiny second, Carlos wanted to freeze everything: the bow, the breath, the petal, the quiet, himself.
Then he heard Auntie Mariko’s voice from outside: more kinds of seeing.
He stopped trying to hold the moment still. He noticed it while it was happening.
Then Hanare came.
His fingers opened. The string sang once. The arrow left the bow and could not be called back, just as the petal could not be put back on the branch.
Carlos stayed in his finishing posture. The petal on his sleeve loosened and dropped to the floor. He saw it fall, but he did not chase it with his hand or eyes.
When he looked toward the target, the arrow was already there. The shot was finished. The blossom outside had changed. The petal was on the floor now. Nothing waited for Carlos to keep it the way it had been.
Auntie Mariko stood near the doorway. “Did you miss it?” she asked softly.
Carlos looked at the arrow, then at the petal near where his foot had been. “No,” he said. “I saw it while it was here.”
At the end of practice, Carlos helped sweep the petals that had blown inside. He did not try to save the prettiest one. He did not count how many were on the broom. He swept slowly so they gathered without scattering again.
Outside, the cherry tree was still full of blossoms, but not as full as before. The path was pink in small patches. The sparrow hopped among the fallen petals, pecked once, and flew to the fence.
On the walk home, Carlos found three petals in his hair and one stuck to the side of his practice bag. He left them there for a while. They would fall when they were ready, or when his mother noticed them, whichever came first.
Carlos did not need to carry every blossom home. He had seen them under the tree. He had seen one fall from his sleeve. He had seen one moment become the next.
That was enough to keep.
Leave a Reply