My mother’s name was Sakurada before she married. Sakurada, meaning “cherry blossom field.” A name that promised softness, a carpet of petals, the fleeting perfection of spring. But my mother was not soft. She was the stone the cherry tree roots cracked open.
People see the photo on the altar—her at twenty, beneath a torrent of pink blossoms in the garden of the old Sakurada house—and they sigh. How delicate , they whisper. How ephemeral . They do not know that the day that photo was taken, she had just walked twelve kilometers from the city after the trains stopped running. That her sandals had broken, and her feet were bleeding. That the smile she gave the camera was the same smile she would give bill collectors, landlords, and the social worker who asked if she was sure she could raise a child alone. sakura sakurada mother
One spring, when I was eleven, she took me to the old Sakurada plot. Nothing was left but a cracked foundation and one enormous, ancient cherry tree. The house had burned down a decade before I was born. She stood beneath it, the wind pulling strands of gray from her black hair. My mother’s name was Sakurada before she married
A petal lands on my hand. It is not soft. It is wet. It smells like rain on old stone. She was the stone the cherry tree roots cracked open
She taught me that a cherry tree’s beauty is not in the falling petal, but in the bark. The gnarled, scarred, dark bark that survives the winter.
“This is where I learned to hate beautiful things,” she said, not to me, but to the air. “My father spent all our money planting these trees. He said a man who grows beauty cannot be poor. My mother starved while he pruned branches.”