I really wanted to come up with a clever title for this post, but all I keep coming back to is “Summer Loving” from Grease and “Saturday in the Park” and “Aquarius” from Hair, and none of these quite work. The muses enjoy a good joke, though, so I’m sure now that I’ve typed this out, they’ll hand me the perfect title and I’ll have to delete this whole paragraph. Or not, if you’re actually reading it.
Anyway, as days get warmer and sunsets get later, one of our favorite things to do in the evenings is walk up to the park near our apartment to enjoy the last beams of sun and watch the stars emerge. There’s a playground and a basketball/badminton court on the far side of the park, but usually you can’t hear much from them on the park benches where we sit, but you can watch the dogs play and people throw around balls and frisbees for them (and for themselves).
Starting later in the month, they’re going to run a volleyball game there one night a week, and I’ve signed up to play. It’s been a while since I played on grass, and I’m not really sure how they’re going to orient the net so that we don’t constantly have to chase the ball down into the street, but I’m sure someone else has given this some thought. I’ve played volleyball in an urban park in the middle of a busy divided state highway before, so I have confidence we can make it work.
They’ve also posted the four-movie lineup for this summer, which will include A League of Their Own and either an Indiana Jones or Star Wars movie (I recall Harrison Ford, but not which franchise). I think Rudi and I were saying we’d seen them all, which alleviates the imperative to get there right at the start of the film, which can be problematic for us for the movies at the beginning and end of the season.
It’s a nice park to live near in the middle of the city and we’re lucky to have access to it.
(And, nope, still got nothing on the park lyric front…)
One of the things Rudi and I did on Sunday was to ride our bikes down to the Mall to see the tail end of the cherry blossoms, which I’ll share with you later in the week. Before we headed home, though, we decided to go check out the Floral Library, which is home to a gorgeous collection of tulips (and other flowers).
Located adjacent to the Tidal Basin, the garden was established in 1969 by Lady Bird Johnson, who did a lot of sprucing up of D.C. open spaces (and who is honored on the far side of the Potomac with her own memorial space) and includes approximately 10,000 bulbs in 93 beds tended by the National Park Service (who do a lovely job every year).
While the gardeners clearly take great pride with categorizing the bulbs in each bed, sometimes one sneaks in where it clearly wasn’t intended. Some people might think those are mistakes, but I like to think they’re allowing that flower to stand out in the crowd.
We were so wet and cold, though, that we didn’t stay probably as long as we would have liked. But we were glad to have seen them once again!
D.C. is home to the famous cherry trees down on the Tidal Basin, but also to a surprising number in neighborhoods all over town. Both these shots are from within half a mile of where I live.
We came back to D.C. Monday to find more things blooming, including this bush near our apartment.
Peak bloom for the cherry blossoms down along the Tidal Basin will begin tomorrow and will carry on into next week, depending on whether you ask the National Park experts or the local meteorologists at the Washington Post. As Saturday is slated to bring cold and possibly even snow (for our first garden clean-up of the season — hooray!), the flowers are more likely to keel over from shivering than sweating. (It will also make our neighborhood stink because magnolia trees are definitely Southerners and they drop their flowers if the thermometer even thinks about dipping too low.)
Jennifer Hudson sings the Bob Dylan classic, “The Times They Are a-Changin'” with a choir from here in D.C. (Everyone keeps listing it as the D.C. Choir, but I can’t find any such thing on the internet.) to conclude yesterday’s March for Our Lives.
