Brilliance audio a day like this by Kelly McNeill performed by Amanda lee cobb, I reached down to snip a couple of fat lilac blooms from the lower branches, just as a chill hit my shoulders.

The sun had been high and bright in the earlier mid-afternoon sky, but puffy white dots had given way to dense gray clouds that reminded me of towering medieval castles floating along an invisible river. If I looked long enough, I could almost see dark turrets in them and imagine an army gathering inside the fortress prepared to attack clouds were bigger in this sky than in other places here under the giant blue dome above my hayfield home, the breeze picked up blowing Strands from my ponytail loose, so they lashed in tiny pinpricks at the corners of my eyes. I marveled at the sight of the purple stems in my hand the first thing I’d done after planting the lilacs seven years ago apologized to them.

It was only fair because, if anything was certain, it was that the spindly little stems were not in good hands and would never grow if they were an opposite of a green thumb, it was mine and they didn’t stand a chance.

It gave us a good, laugh and graham had performed a comical eulogy for the poor things, I’d sprinkled water over the seedlings and wished them well. Lilacs were kind of a thing for me when I was a child. There had been tall lilac bushes, near my house. Growing wild and mostly unkempt throughout an otherwise gray city neighborhood, they hovered at the edges of cracked sidewalks, overgrown weedy things ignored by just about everyone until they created an aggravating blind spot at the end of a driveway or scratched at a window, at which point they Were trimmed back or cut down altogether leaving an unsightly trunk of tough brown sticks poking out of the ground too difficult to remove without considerable effort, but in the springtime, their fragrance perfumed, the air with sunshine, while giant blossoms of pale purple and white dotted the bushes In the dozens promising the arrival of long summer days, the old neighborhood grouch at the end of the street, once caught me with a pair of scissors, reaching up on tiptoes to snip off a few stolen blooms when she yelled at me to get out of her Yard I wondered why she cared.

After all, there was a grimy plastic grocery bag stuck in the branches and shards of broken bottled glass on the ground beneath it, but people were funny about their yards, I’d clutched, the flowers tighter and taken off running once home.

I hoisted myself up onto the counter to retrieve a glass filled, with water, closed my eyes to breathe in the scent, and placed the treasured flowers and a makeshift vase. As a gift for my mother, the flowers had forever reminded me of clean sheets and fresh air and hope when graham and I bought this place, we nicknamed it the yellow house after the color of the wooden siding and then spent a considerable amount of time standing On all sides of it, heads cocked to one side imagining where on earth to start there was no landscaping to speak of and when a house sits on 10 acres in the middle of an endless field, you really tend to notice such a thing.

A white porch spanned the entire front of the house and from its perch atop a hill one, could enjoy the kind of view that photographers dream of, like a number of thirty-somethings at the time. We’D left city life in manhattan. To try our hand at life in the country in upstate new york, not a hobby farm exactly but perhaps inspired by the romantic notion of one trouble was we didn’t know a single thing about old houses or big land, but our timing was good.

It seemed the house had been vacant for a number of years and the grown children of the previous owner had been eager to get it off their hands, plus it was 2007 and they were doling out mortgages like free candy. So after handing over the majority of our savings and signing the closing papers, we were the proud owners of a house that looked like it had been drawn from childhood dreams, with a box of crayons a little bit crooked. But perfectly so the day we signed the closing papers. The first thing: we’d purchased, were items we’d, spotted at a roadside, a stand that sold vegetables, used furniture, and odds and ends. We bought two wooden rocking chairs for the porch, which we painted white and two three-dollar styrofoam cups of tiny seedlings marked lilac.

It’S a sign. I said to graham after spotting the little plant my favorite flower he’d merely raised a skeptical eyebrow. What you never know, I remember saying, with an optimum…

More From This Category