This is very much a spring story, a story of a precise time and place. There are many details which I've borrowed from my past, altered as I saw fit (one of the privileges of being a writer), shined up a bit like tarnished old silver with a soft and forgiving cloth.
Lilacs always transform me. I trespass if I need to, enter strangers' yards to stand and smell for a long drunken time, my nose nestled into the luxuriance, a loopy smile on my again-twelve-year-old face.
"The smell of lilacs idled heavy in the air before and after, as they talked and talked. The purple of the Pyrenees, of wisdom, mystery, and magic; the bruised powerful Tyrian color; the doomed sails of Theseus color, a shade royal and doomed, forbidden in Japan, treasured by the Mixtec, scorned by the Roman poet Horace in describing prose. The color of thunderstorms in the canyons of the cliff dwellings at Bandelier, in the storm-bruised mountains nearby, in the sky to the north on summer opera nights when passions were alive and danger in the air."
image: Gustave Baumann, A Lilac Year
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