I was at Home Depot yesterday, staring at the recently offloaded plants displayed on the parking lot, wondering who wanted to come home with me. There’s no room in my tiny yard for vegetables plus, I hate to confess, I’m easily influenced by looks. I studied the roses for a long time. Not all pretty boys are tomatoes.
Unfortunately, I killed some boxwoods with salt runoff during the ice storms this winter, so I was perusing replacements, when I saw a whole row of lilacs in their plastic containers. They were too small to bloom this year but lilacs and I have some history. They were my mother’s favorite flower and I have yet to successfully plant any in her memory.
When I was 5 or 6, my first friend, Rosie and I made lilac bouquets, then sneaked up and laid them against the front doors of the unsuspecting, knocked, and ran off. It was the running off that was fun. I don’t think it crossed our minds to actually hand the flowers over. The point was to create a mystery—a gift from an unidentified source was a cooler gift somehow.
The startled recipients were primarily Rosie’s mother, my mother, and Mrs. Nelker with whom we had no relationship. She lived down the road with her husband Mitch, and I remember only her unnaturally black hair.
Rosie had an enormous lilac hedge to supply our enterprise but as I got older it required more ingenuity to find lilacs to bring home. Whether I had to drive out into the country, look along farm fences, deserted barns, houses, even by moonlight, without a place to grow them myself, every year that I could, I found a way to bring lilacs to my mother.
And then, in January, as one year gave way to the next, Mom died.
My sisters and I planned to fly her ashes from Maryland to Illinois so she could be buried in the cemetery where her parents lay—a grassy hill her father mowed for extra cash during the Depression and where she played as she waited for him to take her home. We would bury her there in May when the flowers bloomed.
My oldest sister is an artist, and her design of the headstone was an act of devotion. The depth of the engraving, the way the light would hit it, the carving of a little girl with a lamb in her arms—reminiscent of the premature lambs mother bottle-fed to health by the hearth as a girl.
And the words—what to inscribe on the face of the stone? She was our mother, but also a healer and a poet in love with the world. We wanted to encompass all those parts of her. So we ended up using her own words, part of a poem she had written about how we carry home with us wherever we go, from a wave-washed shore along a distant blue ocean to “that faraway farmhouse wrapped with the harvest, tucked in by the sky.” She was writing of her childhood home, of course. Now she was home-home, and we were going to have to leave her on a prairie hillside for eternity when we flew back East. Who would bring her lilacs every year?
We found a nursery a thousand miles from us and asked them to plant a lilac by her headstone, then planned a trip to Illinois to bury her ashes that May.
Why am I telling you this and why now? Because the lilacs are blooming and May is on fast approach. And because of what happened at the airport in Charlotte and what I now know.
The three of us were on a layover waiting at the gate for our flight to St. Louis where we would rent a car and drive to the country cemetery in Illinois. My sisters were reading magazines, occupied, and I was watching the soundless tv monitor—some news show with a scrawl running beneath it. I was thinking how cool it would be if the scrawl suddenly revealed a secret message from Mom. I couldn’t imagine what—just something. Our names? “Thank you?” “I’m with you always?” But of course, the scrawl just kept running updates on the latest oil prices.
I don’t think I’ve ever found a miracle when I was looking for one—and I don’t think we are very good architects of the extraordinary. Our ideas are never as creative as what the universe can deliver—it just knocks on the door and waits for you to discover its gifts.
Because suddenly, out of nowhere the entire seating area was filled with the unmistakable scent of lilacs. I snapped to attention, scanned the other people seated in the waiting area and no one had moved, just the same weary, bored bunch staring at their phones. I glanced at the concourse—no one passing at the moment. Yet the scent flowed around me.
“Lilacs!!” I exclaimed to my sisters. “Lilacs!” They both looked up, but I wasn’t sure they understood me over the sound of announcements on the speaker system. Soon, United would be boarding our flight. They both smiled and looked back down.
It’s been six years and I have never asked my sisters if they smelled the sudden scent of lilacs until, on a visit last month, I finally inquired.
They said no.
Somewhere in time, two little girls have left a gift and are running, now crouched in the bushes, clutching hands as a mystery unfolds.
If you hear a knock, come to the door. The universe is more creative, and love is so much bigger than you have been told.
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