National parks and reserves are to be

treasured and cared for as well as preserved for future generations.

I remember a bill board I saw quite often as a young kitten. It advertised something  which puzzled me at the time. If I asked my parents about it then  it obviously meant nothing to them either because I would have remembered the answer  - and perhaps have forgotten the billboard altogether.

The billboard advertised a "cherry blossom festival" in Japan. This was  to my mind something quite extraordinary, indeed it was extraordinary. First of all it was advertising Japan which was a very exotic, rare and unlikely destination at the time. Nobody we knew had ever been to Japan. It was unlikely that anybody we knew would ever go.  Indeed it was at least another twenty years before I met anyone from Downunder who had been to Japan or was going to Japan. Then a friend's daughter went. She was actually learning Japanese and she eventually spent some years living there.  

It was at that time I began  to understand the significance of the cherry blossom festival. M....  wrote and told me about the festival. She had been told by people she met there about the festival. When  it occurred she was bewildered and disappointed. People were making a fuss about "a few trees and a tiny bit of blossom". It took her some time to realise that, living in a major Japanese city, this really was something that the local people did get excited about. They really appreciated and cherished those few trees in a way that only the locals could do it.  Those trees were rare because trees were rare. Blossom was rarer still. People went simply to look at it. 

I understand a little more, although not enough, of Japanese culture now and I can appreciate a little of what those Japanese were seeing and feeling. It still puzzled me that the billboard had that impact on me and that I should remember it in that way but I am glad  it has.

Yesterday, being Father's Day, Middle Cat went and "sprang" the Senior Cat from the residence and we all went off to a local arboretum and then on to a local reserve. There is a narrow winding road in to the reserve. At the beginning of it there is a small caravan park. At the end of it there are a few houses. Middle Cat knows someone who lives in the last house at the end of the road. For that reason she can go past the point where cars are supposed to stop and turn back. Instead she took us right to the end where it was quiet. 

I would not want to live there in summer. It  is a fire disaster waiting to happen. Yesterday though it was lovely. It was green. Middle Cat  stopped the car for a bit. We watched two boys of about ten or eleven building something on the far bank of the creek. They were so intent on what they were doing I doubt they were aware of us. They were doing the sort of thing we did at that age - something that almost no child who lives in such close proximity to the city can now do. We watched the birds and observed the blossom which is coming out on those trees which flower, particularly the wattle.

As Middle Cat started the car again I heard the Senior Cat give a contented sigh. It was a "cherry blossom" moment I suppose.