A rain of cherry blossoms

Bella came for the afternoon yesterday. It was misting rain, but we're Portlanders, so we went out with our rain hoods up, danced through puddles, slid down wet slides, and swung on wet swings. I showed her what happens when you sit under a blossoming cherry tree while your Baba shakes a low-hanging branch with her left hand and holds a camera in her right hand.

Bella loved the shower of rain-drops and cherry petals and kept saying, "Mas, mas," which oddly sounds more like the Portuguese, "mais(h)" when she says it. I set the shutter speed on 400 so I could catch the falling petals, and I took about two hundred pictures, all of them pure joy to my eyes. This is how she and I are most alike: we live in the expectation that something wonderful is just about to happen. And it often does, especially when we're together.