Every year, they picnic under the cherry blossoms. This is their story.

Yet again the couple rose before the sun, carefully packed their hamper and headed to their spot by the Tidal Basin, tucked amid the cherry blossom trees.

On the last Thursday of March, they unfurled their blue and red blanket, just as they have for decades. They once sat in the grass; now they sit on a low stone wall. Better for their knees, they agreed.

They arranged the cheese, bread and salmon. They poured mimosas – made with club soda, if anyone asked.

They smiled as the branches, crowned with thousands of delicate flowers, caught the rising sun. They clinked their glasses. Cheers.

“I’m one of the luckiest people on Earth,” Elizabeth Willson, 74, said.

“Well, then I’m the other luckiest,” said Garland Phillips, 81.

For 27 years, they have enjoyed an annual picnic under the pink-and-white blossoms. Passersby would smile. Some gave and received a wave. Others stopped to chat.

Perhaps many more wondered, who is that sweet couple?

They met in the summer of 1997, both divorced and set up by friends.

He was an FBI employee and avid woodworker. She was a librarian and choral singer, a lover of opera and ballet. First, they spoke on the phone, discussing light topics: What is the nature of reality? How can we know that anything we perceive is real?

Their first date was dinner at Luigi’s, a now-shuttered pizza-and-pasta parlor on 19th Street. How would they recognize each other?

Willson said she’d wear a distinctive hat. Phillips said he would, too.

Willson said she’d also don a pair of Groucho glasses – black frames with bushy brows, a mustache and plastic nose.

Wanting to gauge his humor, she brought a second pair.

“If he wouldn’t put them on, it would be clear we didn’t have the same sense of whimsy,” she said.

She walked in wearing the glasses and a wide-brimmed, polka-dot hat. There was her date at a table for two, in a Soviet officer hat and his own pair of Groucho glasses. He held a rubber cigar.

“I knew we were going to hit it off,” she said. Two years later, they married.

They aren’t certain who proposed the first cherry-blossom date. Probably Willson.

They laid the blue and red blanket in the grass, drank tea and mimosas, laughed, and talked as the sun climbed the blushing sky. They came the next year and the next.

“You do something twice, it’s a tradition,” Phillips said.

“When you get married when you’re nearly 50, you’re aware that you don’t have as much time to make memories as when you marry young,” Willson said. “You must treasure those special moments because you don’t have as long. You must make the most of each day.”

Each year, they pull out those Groucho glasses for an anniversary meal of when they first met.

By the Tidal Basin, they’ve sat in the snow, bundled in coats and beanies, and in the heat, sporting shirts and sun hats.

They set up by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. The early morning quiet flows undisturbed, save for the urban hum of distant traffic, patter of footsteps and the gush of nearby fountains.

“We always go in the middle of the week,” Willson said.

“We try to hit the peak bloom,” Phillips said.

Now they live in a 250-year-old home in rural Virginia. Still, they return to the blossoms for sunrise, to see a new day dawn over the city they love.

They bring pâté, olives, cheese, a good loaf of French bread and smoked salmon, a gift from Phillips’ sister on the West Coast.

“Garland loves banana bread, so I always bake a loaf,” Willson said.

They usually bring an apple or a pear. This year they forgot.

Last Thursday, as they sat on their blanket and enjoyed their spread, “at least six people said they’d seen us before,” Phillips said.

“Including one lady who said, ‘Oh, I was hoping I’d see you again,’ ” Willson added.

Among the crowd was Michael Copperthite, who recognized them and decided to strike up a chat. With permission, he took their photograph.

“That moment, it was special. You’re lucky to capture something like that,” Copperthite, 69, later said.

He plans to put the image in a scrapbook. He posted it on Reddit, too.

It seemed to serve as a salve: Their romantic tradition a totem of soothing consistency in a world that can often feel precarious.

“Oh I needed this happiness on a depressing day,” one user commented.

“Hoping a love like this finds me,” another said.

“Thank you for making me smile,” said a third.

A few days later, a heavy storm shook many branches bare. The National Park Service declared peak bloom over.

But the sweet couple were long gone, already excited for next year.