Photo and Commentary ©2023 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday, May 21, 2023
She waited for years and years. We had two lilac bushes in our front yard, which faithfully wore leaves each year, but never a bud or a blossom appeared. My mother seldom expressed longings, but this one we heard about. How she longed for those lilacs to bloom!
Our next-door neighbor’s yard had a big lilac bush which bloomed profusely, a cruel contrast to our underachievers. And then one year the next-door neighbors on the other side of us cut down their mountain ash trees which had shaded that part of our garden, and our lilacs at last bloomed. We discovered we had one lavender and one white lilac bush, and we rejoiced. Especially my mother.
Perhaps because of those long years of longing, and certainly because of their fragrance, I inherited my mother’s strong love of lilacs.
I have apparently confided this love to the right people through the years, because at different times and in different places, dear friends Hope and Mildred and Jeanette brought me bouquets of lilacs each spring. They brought me beauty and kindness and memories.
Sharon and John then kicked it up a notch. They brought me more than bouquets – they brought us a bush! They said they needed to thin out some plants in their yard and offered us a lilac bush. I probably said yes before they finished asking.
And so they showed up one day and helped us plant the bush in our front yard, cautioning us before they drove away that it probably would need to settle in and so would likely not bloom until the next spring. But bloom it did, that spring.
Several years later when we moved to a new home, I was not leaving that lilac behind. It once again was carted away and replanted, this time in our back yard. We moved in early April, and the next month it bloomed. This bush apparently had not heard that it might need a year to settle in whenever it was uprooted and replanted, or else it knows how much I love it and is happy to oblige. I think this spring it doubled its blossoms, much to my delight.
The reason we planted the bush in the back yard is that there was no room in our small front yard. We already had rhododendron bushes occupying prime real estate in front of our living room window. But after a year in our new home I was startled one morning to see lilacs blooming from a bush next to the rhodies! I still don’t see how I could have missed the fact that we had purchased a home with a front yard lilac bush, but I couldn’t come up with any explanation other than I had overlooked its existence.
Once upon a time someone told me that one definition of love is “paying attention.” I love all things floral, and green and growing, so I was abashed and apologetic that I had apparently not been paying close enough attention. I think of that every spring when I exult in the beauty and fragrance of lilacs in both our front and back yards.
I always think, too, of how Hope and Mildred and Jeanette and Sharon and John paid attention when I expressed my love of lilacs, and generously gave me the gift of what I loved. And since our lilacs are always in bloom on Mother’s Day, I am also awash in memories of her love of lilacs and her love of me.
Lilacs will always remind me of love and longing. One of these days, when Jesus comes and reunites us with those we’ve loved and longed to see again, I will tell my mother that I, “the baby of the family,” lived to be older than she had lived on this earth, and that I had once lived in a house which had a lilac bush in the front yard, and the back yard – and both persistently bloomed their hearts out. I imagine us sitting under some lilac bushes as I tell her this.
I’m so glad we live in a climate where spring annually stirs us with its freshness and beginning again, when we can witness the miracle of resurrection power. Lilacs remind me of our Creator, the giver of all good gifts, the One who for some unfathomable reason paid attention to us to the extent that He literally loved us to death.
Here is my gift to you: words that speak to my heart — not only of seasons, but of our all-powerful, all-merciful God:
God made sun and moon to distinguish seasons, and day and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons; but God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of His mercies; in Paradise, the fruits were ripe the first minute, and in Heaven it is always autumn, His mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask our daily bread, and God never says you should have come yesterday. He never says you must again to-morrow, but to-day if ye will hear His voice, to-day He will hear you. If some king of the earth have so large an extent of dominion in north and south, as that he hath winter and summer together in his dominions, so large an extent east and west as that he hath day and night together in his dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgment together; He brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; He can bring thy summer out of winter, though thou have no spring . . . . all occasions invite His mercies, and all times are His seasons. (John Donne, from “A Sermon for the Evening of Christmas Day, 1624”)