Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

I love the scent of lilacs in bloom, and this spring I’ve loved them close at hand.

When we first moved into this house, we planted some unassuming lilac bushes that struggled a while but have now come into their own. Three nest outside the bedroom that is my office, and on nights like tonight when my windows are open their scent fills the room and swells my memories.

Lilacs grew wild on the farm I lived on for a year or so in upstate New York in my youth. My Aunt Cel and Uncle Frank took me in when they had to; and, when I smell that lavender scent today I think of that magical time when getting dirty in the name of growing potatoes or corn was a wonderful thing. They are both long gone, but not forgotten.

After leaving that farm, I morphed into city folk as I lived in Syracuse, St. Louis, Little Rock, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Detroit by the time I’d hit the quarter century mark. Yet, I remember lilacs in some of those places.

Syracuse, for instance. We lived in the upstairs of a house and the neighbor next door had wonderful, though overgrown, lilac bushes. Once I gathered some clothes of mine that no longer fit — I was about ten — and hid the collection under such a bush for a friend of mine who had less than I. When my mother discovered the disappearance of part of my wardrobe she was annoyed, but I like to think the scent of lilacs made her understand.

For some reason, lilacs make me think of poetry too. Walt Whitman wrote “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” in the nineteenth century, but the line “Yet the lilac with mastering odour hold me” could be said of my feelings today. That’s the thing about the scent of lilacs. It’s stimulating and it’s tranquilizing at the same time.