Waiting for a special bloom
One of these evenings pretty soon now, the scent of lilacs is going to come drifting through the bedroom window. Count on it: You'll be falling asleep and there it will be - that heady, almost-cloying cachet that announces the end of early spring and the beginning of a warmer, loamier, more romantic period.
It's a small town Midwestern phenomenon. A dreamy, once-a-year thing worthy of Rogers and Hammerstein. If there's an ounce of callow adolescent left in your jaded soul, the lilacs will find it and coax it out. When the lilacs come out, it can be prom season. Even for old folks.
Lilac bushes are long-lived, and it's nice to think the same lilacs that are blooming tonight were blooming on other evenings when you were young and your hormones were raging, not sparking and sputtering the way they are now.
Careful, though. The scent of those lilacs can trigger lots of other deep-seated memories. No other blossom can go from "romantic spring evening" to "drug store perfume counter" or, worse yet, "aging gramma" in a single whiff.
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Then there are lilac flowers themselves - tall bunches of them clipped from bushes and arranged in tall vases on kitchen tables or living room pianos or bedroom dressers. Lilacs are peasant flowers and prefer ordinary vases. Woolworth-like vases. Or even tall plastic pitchers. Your basic lilac bunch doesn't respond well to crystal.
For Catholics of a certain age, lilacs invoke memories of May as Mary's month. Back then, every girl was named "Mary-Something". Mary Beth, Mary Pat, Mary Ruth. Mary Jo. Mary-This. Mary-That.
Year in, year out, Mary-Whoever got to lead the school procession. And every classroom statue and shrine to the Virgin was festooned with bunches and bunches of lilacs.
For people who grew up on farms, lilacs invoke memories of home and the lilac bush outside the mudroom door - or the hedge half way across the yard on the way to the barn.
For flower lovers, lilacs are the promise of perennial pleasures to come. If we have lilacs, can peonies and hydrangeas and clematis be far behind?
And it all starts any night now with the faintest hint of a scent from a bush out there somewhere. Hot darn. Put on an extra blanket. Throw the bedroom window open a little wider. Get ready to feel starry-eyed and vaguely discontented. The lilacs are coming and it may as well be spring.
