Lilacs

This past Sunday was Mother’s Day. I drove to my hometown a hundred miles away to visit with my mother and take her to dinner.

This has been the wettest Spring I can ever remember, so as I drove it was great to see that blinding bright circle in the late afternoon sky.

The grass was deep green; green like the finger paint of a 5-year-old in kindergarten discovering what it is to create. The trees have birthed equally green leaves between days of torrents of rain punctuated by an occasional half-day of sunshine.

I’ve noticed all these things because it prompts me to wonder how many more Springs I’ll have to celebrate Mother’s Day with my mother who’s now in Assisted Living, journeying through the twilight years of life; her short-term memory nearly gone, hanging by a cerebral thread.

We enjoyed pizza with my sister and my nephew; we laughed and talked and compared ailments. We talked of future plans as though we were guaranteed that a future exists; vacations and new houses and graduation and college and new steps with new hips for people growing older with each bite of pizza.

After a few hours I took my mother back to where she now lives; it’s a bittersweet place. Her home that she once shared with a husband and children now sits nearly empty, waiting on a Garage Sale to clean out the remnants of a million memories and dozens of Christmases and Mother’s Days and birthdays that produced gifts of ceramic angels and floral baskets and amber glassware destined for somebody else’s home.

Assisted Living is a safe place; a place where 80-year-old widows don’t fall in the garage, unable to get up, chilled to the bone on the concrete floor for hours.

It’s a place where other 80-year-old men and women sing hymns on Sunday afternoons; hymns that once meant something in a country where young husbands went off to fight The Great War only to drown on a sinking ship in the English Channel on Christmas Day.

It’s a place to play bingo to win a quarter and listen to the chirp of delicate birds in the aviary that sits near the entrance, and take an unplanned nap because life has worn one out.

After getting my mother situated in her home I drove to her house that sits empty. I’d known for a couple of weeks, as the grass grew greener and the leaves grew daily more lush that the lilacs were in bloom. My mother has a large lilac bush at her house that has a story of its own.

In 1973 my parents had built a new house far from where I had lived the first 16 years of my life. It was the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. It was a dreadful time for me.

I had been uprooted from all I’d ever known, friends, school and everything familiar. We were leaving the dead-end street where we lived and summers of swimming in our neighbor’s swimming pool, playing baseball in “the field”, playing basketball at the funeral home a few blocks away and running barefoot in the green grass of our backyard that sat next to the railroad tracks where great engines roared, drowning out our laughter as we played tag and kickball.

Many of those Spring evenings, when our backyard was our playground, we’d utilize a large lilac bush that sat between our yard and our neighbor’s, the Hauensteins, as a hiding place, or a fort or a barricade, depending on what game we were playing.

Somewhere in time the scent of lilacs bored deep into my senses and mind and anchored themselves there as a disturbingly fond memory. It’s a disturbing memory because it demands yesterday. It demands a dream of returning to youthful innocence; it demands a wish for a simpler time.

When my parents moved us in 1973 they dug up part of that lilac bush that was the organic fence between us and our neighbors and transplanted it at our new house, the one that’s now an empty memory.

I rolled into the driveway at my mother’s house and parked next to the lilac bush. I grabbed an old pair of hand-held hedge trimmers and began to lop off a bunch of the lilac flowers.

With each snap of the trimmers the aroma of the flowers forced its way deep into my senses and stirred up memories like a witch stirring a bubbling cauldron.

Lilacs bloom for only a few weeks each year, so I’ve grown to deeply value those few weeks; I’ve even been known to snap a twig or two from a lilac bush in our neighborhood on a walk.

In my mind there are few things in life that rival the aroma of lilacs; for some reason I think it should be renamed “the memory flower.” I have one lying next to me as I write.

I drove the hundred miles back home in the dark Sunday evening; a dozen lilac flowers lay on the passenger seat next to me and filled the car with an aromatic sweetness. Every ten minutes or so I would pick up a flower and raise it to my face and remember…