Lilacs

When I was a kid, my mother adored lilacs. She still does.

There was only one lilac tree on our farm, and it was a spindly little thing whose flowers barely bothered to open. It grew, reluctantly, from behind the dilapidated workshop where my father repaired broken farm equipment. Seven or so years after they'd move to the farm, my father tore it down and built a bigger shop, this time with a real concrete floor and a functional garage door. It had a chain, even, to raise and lower it. He saved the lilac tree. "Probably the only thing I did right in this marriage," he mused to me once, which seemed a dramatic thing to say but actually was probably true, given the decades-long implosion of my parent's marriage, an implosion that was so quiet and slow it took forty years to come to a final, painful, legal conclusion.

The lilac tree never flourished.

But there was a grove of lilac trees in the swampland a few miles from our farm. Eight or nine of them, I think, enormous and full of lilac blooms so thick you could almost feel the pollen as a real, furry, fuzzy, live thing. My mother hunted those lilacs like a starving woman. Driving home from the grocery store, she'd turn left on Willow Road, and my siblings and I would wail: "Noooooooooo, Mom!" We knew what was next.

Mom parked the station wagon along the ditch on the gravel road. She dumped the groceries out of the brown bags, piling the pasta and ground beef and cracker boxes and Comet on the floorboards, and sneak over to the lilac trees, her eyes shining, the happiest criminal on the planet. She broke off the lilacs, branch by branch, and filled the grocery bags. Armfuls and armfuls of them. Us kids watched out for the telltale green pickup of the State Wildlife Ranger. I was terrified they'd arrest her and take her to jail. I knew somewhere inside me it was ridiculous, but I was a very worried child and jail was the worst thing I could imagine. I pictured it: Us four, walking home, carrying the groceries, and telling my father, "Mom got arrested."

"What for?"

"Stealing lilacs."

He'd shake his head. "Sounds like your mother," he'd say, and go on fixing whatever was broken that day.

She never got arrested. At home, she'd shove those lilacs into Mason jars and scatter them all over the kitchen. She placed one in each bedroom, too; mine went on top of my worn-out antique dresser—antique not in the collector sense, but antique because it was so damned old. I could see them as I fell asleep, and their scent nestled up in my dreams. I'd stare at the purple blooms, up against the repeated pattern of my Holly Hobbie wallpaper, and I'd feel the coming of spring.

I stole lilacs from my neighbor today. She has a beautiful lilac bush. She wouldn't care; I'm sure of it. She'd tell me to take more. Still, though, I snuck them, my eyes flitting around like I was stealing cash from an ATM. I scurried back to my house to look for a Mason jar. I wondered if stealing lilacs is part of my joy of having them. I took a picture and sent it to my mother. "I can smell them from here," she said.