Under the Lilacs

Another beautiful, warm, sunny spring day in the Pacific Northwest. One of those days that made me feel fortunate to be alive and able to appreciate life. I was sitting outside and realized the wonderful smell in the air was lilacs. I live far from the upper Midwest these days but the smell took me right back to my childhood in northern Wisconsin. Our yard here has camellias and rhododendrons and they’re lovely. But they’re not lilacs. When I was small, our yard had lilac bushes on each side of the house. Two white lilacs with kind of a tunnel between them on the north side of the house, pale purple lilacs sharing an area with a huge mock orange on the other. The mock orange and the lilac came together and made a kind of roof and inside felt like a cave. My neighbor and best friend Gwen and I declared the space our personal fort. Sometimes my mother would let us have Saltines and, mixed with water, we made “cracker soup”. My sister, who was eight years older, would occasionally humor us when we invited her into our not-so-secret fort for a tea party with that soup. When I was in my teens the mock orange had become overgrown and a bit scraggly and had overstepped its bounds, so to speak. The people in the house next door, on whose property it technically belonged, cut it down.Though we had long ago abandoned it as a fort, I was devastated. The neighbors assured me it would come back stronger and healthier than ever but it never did. I still feel a certain sense of childhood loss. There’s a big lilac in the yard where I live now. Come and visit, I promise to serve you a nice bowl of cracker soup.