It might be spring

It might be spring

by Laura Harrison McBride

We had no lilacs at our city house in France--so I painted some on the security gate on our front window.

A funny winter, this last. Hardly

any cold weather. What there

was seemed colder than usual.

Still, the camellias began to bloom

in January. The white one I see

driving home from Waitrose

flowered at the appointed time. But

the snowdrops were late. The

lipstick-coloured camellias—the

Kiss Me Corals and Strike Me Pinks--

have only been out a week or so. No

matter; they are dropping dead heads

as usual, littering the ground below

with mushy brown dying flowers. They're

a mess, camellias are, after they bloom.

I don't like them.

I like neater plants—for instance, lilacs,

whose blossoms just get dry if they are

left unpicked. Not in this house, of course.

I pick all the lilacs. I would pick every lilac

there was, if I could. I'd bury my nose

in an armful of lilacs, the old lavender

kind—no use for white or deep purple

or red-purple because they smell funny,

not like lilacs.

I live here for the lilacs. After a nomad's

life for sixty years, I've got three planted,

an old traditional, a miniature Syrian

(dark purple, sigh) and a topiary old purple

lilac in a tub on the deck. I wonder if any

will give me armloads of blooms before

I die. It takes a while for a bush to reach

armload status, and—after eight years

since the first was planted—we are not there yet.

They say people live until a special event

happens in their lives, one they've waited for.

A wedding, a birth, a commemoration.
Something. For me, it will be lilacs, tons

of lilacs on a bush as big and giving as the one

in my grandmother's backyard 70 years ago,

hard against the back fence, competing

for space with an old-fashioned climbing

rose bush, and farther off, a Rose of

Sharon. I hated the Rose of Sharon. It

drew bees, and did nothing at all

of any use. I liked the roses.

But the lilacs. Last year, when we were in

France in the spring and away from my lilacs,

I made Simon climb down into a gully off a road

we often traveled and pick me the last two

blossoms on an abandoned bush. He didn't

want to; he felt it was stealing. I argued, told

him if anyone cared for the bush gone rogue,

they'd have come to pick the blossoms before

they mainly died. In the end, I prevailed.

But it wasn't pretty.

That's how much I love lilacs.

Copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride