Spring comes to Sakura Hill all at once. One morning the old cherry tree is bare, and the next it is wearing a cloud of pink.
Kiki put on her sakura kimono, the one with the cream obi bow, and ran up the hill before breakfast. The breeze was already busy shaking petals loose.
She held out her hands and closed her eyes. “If you catch a falling petal,” she told Luna, “you get a whole year of happy days.”
Luna sat in the grass and watched the petals float past her nose with big, serious eyes. She didn’t try to catch any. She was waiting for one to land on her bow.
Pip tumbled along with the petals, pale yellow among all that pink, pretending very hard to be a flower. He was not very good at it. Kiki giggled and didn’t say a thing.
Pip spotted: Floating among the petals on the left, not quite pink enough.
