A Complicated Relationship with Lilacs
written by: Joan Leotta
@joanleottawrite
Cassatt and I share a love of lilacs. I have a vase similar to the one in her picture. Mine rests on a table in the center of the bay window in our bedroom. Lilacs first came into my life as they overflowed their bush in grandmother’s late May garden. She showed me how, without doing harm to the mother bush, I could carefully clip two or three bloom rich branches from each so the spray of purple and white flowers could sit in a vase in the dining room and fill her house with their aroma. “Lilacs bloom when spring gives way to summer,” Grandma told me when I asked why the bush didn’t bloom all year long. I loved those days when lilacs reigned over her dining room table. One day, in a craft shop, during that season when as a child I would have been picking lilacs with Grandma, I spied sprays of silk lilacs that looked so real I was sure someone had cut them from a garden that very morning. All they lacked was fragrance—and my imagination could supply that. I set them in a vase my husband and I had purchased on a trip to West Virginia’s Blenko Glass.
A few years later, in that same time of wonder when Spring was packing her buds and tiny blooms to make way for summer, our son stepped off a curb and into Paradise. I regularly filled the cylindrical metal marker vase with fresh flowers of various kinds, watering them with tears. However, it seemed that no matter how often I went, the blooms faded before I arrived with new ones. Then I decided to switch to silk flowers. Once again, the lilacs caught my eye. I purchased enough to make a fulsome bouquet and carried them to the grave. I replaced the remaining brown, dead blooms from my last visit with these everlasting silk ones. While arranging them, I spoke to Joe about my Grandma’s bush. I explained it was only right that lilacs should grace his grave since they mark a transition from one season to another, and he had “transitioned” from this world to the next. I fancied I could hear him chuckle at the connection I was making, hear him chiding me for overreaching, reminding me that placing them there just for their beauty was enough.
Those artificial stems stayed in place through a couple of storms. I let them remain through summer, while we were busy with selling our house. When summer was ending and we sold our house to move south, six hours away from where Joe’s body rests, on our last day before the movers came, I changed out the lilacs for a spray of autumn leaves and chrysanthemums in his college colors. But instead of consigning the still lovely silk lilacs to the trash, I brought them home and added his to the old lilacs in our blue Blenko glass vase, where it presents the same picture as the painting. Now the vase with its spray of Joe’s and other lilacs reign supreme on a small table in front of a window, between two wing chairs. Cassatt’s still life fills my heart with joy and reminds me of my Grandmother, but the silk lilacs in the vase in our room do a double duty, filling our bedroom with the fragrance of memories both sweet and sorrowful– of my childhood and of our son.
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