Lilacs and Memories

 

Carolyn J. Rose

 

I seldom pass a lilac bush in bloom without thinking of Walt Whitman’s poem of mourning for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

But, as is the way of my busy brain, before I become mired in Whitman’s long lament, the memory leads on to another and another. Images overlap and blend together.

 

Lilac bushes abounded in the hollows of the Catskill Mountains where I grew up. Many of them marked houses long gone, flattened by snow and rot, wind, and gravity. Those bushes, once nurtured in sunlit dooryards, had grown spindly in their attempts to reach sunlight blocked by pine and oak and hemlock. Others were moss-covered, gnarled and bent from struggles to survive another winter.

 

But there were also younger bushes, carefully tended, fertilized and pruned. Many were planted with an eye toward shadings of color. White. Lilac. Deep purple.

 

I recall a long lilac hedge along the road the bus traveled in the tedious journey to school. In winter its bare branches did little to shield the home behind it from wind and snow and the interest of those driving past. Spring brought forth leaves, elongated green hearts that made my teenage heart long for love—or what I imagined was love at that hormone-driven age. When the lilacs bloomed, rain-drenched blossoms bending branches toward the ground, it signified the school year was coming to a close. The flowering gave notice that another page of my life was turning, that plans needed to be made, enlarged, or amended.

 

I remember walking dirt roads, catching the scent on a warming breeze, and following it to a flowering bush. Because the blooms turned brown far too soon and didn’t linger into summer they were precious to me. More precious than the varieties of roses my father’s mother managed to grow in the thin and stony soil of a yard shaded by an enormous maple.

 

My mother’s mother had a bottle of lilac perfume and, in the dim light of a winter day, I would sometimes loosen the stopper and sniff. It was sweet, but the scent was nothing like that of the blooms of spring. It was, in fact, more like a faint memory, poorly preserved.