The Lilacs are Fading and I Can’t Stop Them

So I will breathe deep today.

It has been a long day of parenting and I haven’t been outside all day. I get some black beans cooking in the pressure cooker and tell my husband I’ll be back in a few minutes. I want to walk to the little park a couple blocks away. I haven’t walked that way in weeks, but I keep hearing from my daughter how many lilacs there are. “So many, mom!” She keeps coming home from walks with her dad or grandparents with handfuls of blooms she has snapped off. She sticks them in a vase to try to preserve their beauty and intoxicating scent and we ooh and ahh over their beauty together.

I live outside of Rochester, NY. One of our claims to fame is the annual Lilac Festival. I’ve never attended the festival myself (I don’t naturally gravitate towards crowds), but I do make an effort to visit Highland Park after it’s over. I walk slowly through the park, stopping at every lilac tree to inhale deeply and note variations in size, shape, and color. I never knew how many different kinds of lilacs there were before we moved to this area six and a half years ago. Every spring I delight anew in the colors spanning from pure white to deep purple, blooms ranging from minuscule and delicate to large and weighty. I’m sure the scent varies, too, but my olfactory system is content to label it all as heavenly.

A love of lilacs extends out to the whole Rochester area, it seems. Or maybe it’s just that when you start looking for something, you see it everywhere. But they certainly seem to be more abundant than anywhere else I’ve lived. No yard is complete without the obligatory lilac bush. Eleven out of twelve months of the year, they aren’t much to look at, and you may in fact forget that they are there. And then, bam — lilacs everywhere!

I am sometimes hard on myself about my bad memory, but there are times where it serves me well. Even books that I have enjoyed immensely fade quickly from my mind. If I pick them up again months or years later, I don’t remember how they end, so I get to enjoy them again just as much as the first time. Spring hits me the same way. I don’t remember which trees are magnolias and redbuds and flowering crabs until they surprise me by bursting into bloom.

This spring has been full of extra surprises. We moved to a new house last November. Unlike every other dwelling we’ve lived in as a married couple (eight in our almost sixteen years together), we bought this one. Also unlike the most of other places we’ve lived, someone poured a lot of love and money and sweat into landscaping the yard. Though in serious need of weeding and pruning and mulching that we don’t have time to do, the park-like yard has captivated us with its innumerable beautiful growing things.

The previous owners must have had a particular love of shrubs. It’s easy (and cheap) to throw seeds in the ground and grow zinnias or sunflowers or bachelor buttons, but planting a shrub takes commitment. I don’t have the eyes of a landscaper to make that sort of decision, nor the deep pockets to risk it dying due to a badly timed frost or my lack of care.

So it feels like an especially generous gift to receive a yard full of shrubs, most of which appear to be healthy despite recent neglect. Every day, when I manage to get outside for a few minutes, I take a tour of the yard to rejoice in their fleeting blooms. Surprisingly, until a few days ago, I hadn’t found any lilacs. This is Rochester, after all. Oh well, I thought, we have many other beautiful flowering things.

Then one afternoon on my daily tour, I caught a glimpse of something deep purple in the back corner of the yard, up high behind some overgrown shrubbery. Could it be? Previously, I would have told you that my favorite variety of lilac was the tiny, pointed, lavender-colored kind. But no, oh no, I’m now desperately in love with this one, my lilac, with its luscious, heavy blooms as purple as purple could be. There is no lilac to rival it in all of Highland Park, nay, in all of lilac-infested Rochester!

I immediately shared the news with my daughter, who was almost as delighted as me, and my husband, who laughed at my endearing passion for flowers.

So here I am at the park a short walk from our house with “so many!” lilacs. Perhaps I should have invited my daughter along to show me the abundance herself. But I couldn’t do people anymore. I needed to be alone.

There are a lot of lilacs here. I stop by every single one and take a deep breath. I push aside the thought that the four other people at the park will think I’m crazy. I follow the lilac-lined path to its end, slowly, and walk up the hill to the Erie Canal. Ahh, it’s good to be outside. It’s good to see things growing.

But the lilacs are beginning to fade. Like the blooms my daughter attempts to preserve indoors (which are inevitably limp by the next day), the ones still on the trees are beginning to turn brown, their scent slowly fading away.

When I return home I visit our lilac, our very own queen. She grows hidden in a shady back corner of the yard. It is a particular grace that this protected spot extends her bloom time past that of all other, inferior lilacs. I have a few extra days with her before her blooms begin to turn brown and wither.

I couldn’t go with my daughter on her walks to the park because I have another child who hasn’t left the house for months. We never go anywhere as a family, these days, but instead take turns going to church, running errands, attending homeschool co-op, and yes, going for walks. I dream of the day we can go for a walk together as a family again. I strive tirelessly toward that day, seeking out therapists, evaluations, diagnoses, services, medicines, online courses, and parenting strategies that might give us what we need to find some kind of normal life again. No, normal isn’t the right word. I don’t seek normal anymore. I seek joy.

This is one way I seek it: to delight in the goodness of the world. In my home and out of it, darkness threatens to impede my vision of what is good and true and beautiful. I fight back. I smell the lilacs.

The blooms will be gone soon. I will cry a little and then I will look for the next tree whose buds will burst open. I will look for the smile on my son’s face. I will trust that the goodness of the lilacs is a foretaste of the goodness to come.

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