JOY ALONG THE WAY: LILACS STILL IN THE DOORYARD BLOOM, SPARK MEMORIES

It isn't often that one can trace his introduction and subsequent relationship with a certain flower. They just come upon you naturally. Weren't you born knowing clover and dandelions?

Here's my affair with lilacs. Mrs. Schmidt, who lived about a mile down the rocky road from us, made the best yeast bread one ever tasted. Once in a while Mama would send me over to buy a loaf.

Beside the gate by which I entered into Mrs. Schmidt's yard there grew a big, tall, spreading bush. I never paid much attention to it. Mrs. Schmidt had lots of bushes all over the yard. But one magical spring day that gateside bush was adorned with great purple plumes of the sweetest smelling flowers I'd ever encountered. After years of trips to Mrs. Schmidt's, I had at last arrived at the moment when her lilac bush was in full bloom.

I almost forgot the purpose of my visit and lingered so long under the lilac bush, plunging my nose into the purple cascades, that Mrs. Schmidt came out to see why I was loitering.

"What are they?" I asked, brushing a flower across my face.

"Lilacs, honey, lilacs. Haven't you ever seen lilacs?"

"No, ma'am."

She broke off a branch loaded with flowers and handed it to me. I started running home to show the others until Mrs. Schmidt kindly reminded me that maybe I'd come after bread.

My trips home had always been pleasant with the inimitable smell of fresh yeast bread in my hands, but now with that in one hand the lilacs in the other, I was in some kind of fragrancy heaven. I even encountered a mean-looking snake in my pathway and insouciantly kicked it out of my way for having the audacity to enter my fragrant universe.

From that day on I vowed I would never be without lilacs. When the leaves and flowers fell off the branch Mrs. Schmidt had given me, I stuck it in the ground, carefully fertilized it with cow manure as I'd seen Grandma do with her rose cuttings, but that was a no-go. I'd heard by this time that lilac roots grew long and sprang up in bushes far away from the mother plant, but one mile down a rocky road!

I looked through the seed catalogs and found a lilac for sale, but it was too expensive, so Mama said. I inspected Mrs. Schmidt's bush for any little sprouts that may have sprung up. There were none unless they were a half-mile away somewhere.

When large seed pods formed on Mrs. Schmidt's bush, I asked for one, buried the whole pod, but again, no-go.

Then we moved! I hated to leave the farm, but there in the yard of our new home was a glorious lilac bush.

I sat under its shade and tried to read Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," but found it too sad and turned to happier poems, more in tune with the purple fragrance and buzz of the bumblebee wings.

And there, only in another place, you can find me today, sitting under my own profusely blooming lilac bush, reading from the World Book that says, "Lilacs may be grown from seed (not the whole pod), or from cuttings of green lilac wood (not from the dried stick I had tried) or from grafting (what would I have known about grafting then?)" Oh, if I had know then what I know now! But I'm making up for lost time, sitting where the plumes drape over my ears, maybe one with a bumblebee in it. It can enter my universe, but not the snake.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.