Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Lilacs

There are those smells that can make you smile so hard you feel like crying.

We were at the park yesterday playing in the creek (Ceiba up to her belly almost) and tossing rocks. On the way back to the car, we stopped to smell a lilac my nose detected when we had arrived.

Growing up, we had 2 lilac bushes on the farm: 1) the tiny ugly one by the barn that got run over by the tractor while each of us girls learned to cut grass and that the dogs always peed on. It never died, but it never grew. And 2) the giant, beautiful lilac in the backyard along the field road. The giant lilac bush was the one we cut from every spring to fill the waffley green vase on the kitchen table, put sprigs of on the west windowsill where the evening breeze blew through an open window or cut and wrapped in paper towels and tinfoil to take to our teachers at school. We could smell that lilac everytime we walked down the field road in April to mushroom hunt. It was the lilac we took a cutting from and planted in the backyard of our first home.

I smiled very wide today as Ceiba bent down to smell her first lilac... and missed home and bringing flowers into my mom :)

2 comments:

  1. Love this! My grandma had a HUGE lilac bush in her front yard. So large, in fact, that my sister and I would sit in the center of it (inside the bush was a little clearing) and our grandma would pass us little sandwiches through the fragrant branches. What an amazing memory. Every time I smell lilacs I remember that. We brought tinfoiled bundles to our teachers too!

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  2. This was a beautiful post and had me tearing up by the end too! And thanks for stopping by my blog last week. It's so great to "meet" you via cyberspace. We actually live out in Fairfax, VA right now but it's great to know there are fellow FS mid-westerners out there! I'm looking forward to reading about your adventures.

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