The Smell of Lilacs

Memory of childhood is a funny thing. I think I should remember it better than I do. For sure, there are still a few moments solidly engraved, but trauma has done what it always does… it blurs the joy and zooms in on the pain.

Even though the height of my dad’s alcoholism was in my late teens, trauma has blurred and stolen so much from the earlier years for me. When I drive by my childhood house, I’m arrested with memories of that last year - of his struggle to get free, of my desperate pleas, and of tear-stained pillows. I drive by and the car isn’t there (to be clear - it hasn’t been there for 12 years now, since we sold it), but my memory plays tricks on me… and I see it there again and remember the place that he had his last drink.

In an instant, I’m stricken and filled with grief. Oh, how I miss him. Oh, how I loved him. Oh, how I long for him to know my kids.

But then, right in the pit of my grief, a memory of the smell of lilacs washes over me.

Right outside my bedroom windows, until I was old enough to call my husband my home, sat two lilac trees. Their bright purple flowers came so close to my window, they practically reached inside. I kept the windows open during their blossoming, and the smell of lilacs wafted over my dreams, over my sleeping, and over my rising.

I can’t remember much before I was 14, but the smell of lilacs is deep-programmed. My brain can trigger their smell when grief threatens to swallow me whole. It reminds me of possibility.

These early spring bloomers, arising after a season of death and deep sleep, promise that rebirth is possible, and indeed, promised.

I smell the lilacs and I remember possibility, and that the Curator of Creation is always redeeming everything.

So, this spring, 12 years void of lilacs outside my window, I dug in the dirt and planted two trees. I’m on the second floor now, but they’re close enough that I can still open my windows each spring and let the smell wash over me….

Reminding me…

How dearly I loved my dad, and how much he loved me.

Reminding me…

That even in death, the Creator calls forward possibility.