Showing posts with label spring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spring. Show all posts

20 May 2009

The town that smelled of lilacs


Lilac has been my favorite scent since I was tiny. My parents didn't have one in our yard, but there was a yard four houses down with a long fence bordered by lilac after lilac bush, probably twenty of them. I loved to huddle on the sidewalk beside those bushes when the lilacs were in bloom. Every good flower smell, ever, I compared to lilacs.

I had no idea (being the horticultural idiot that I am) when we bought this home in July 2000 that one of my bushes was a lilac. I had that delightful surprise the following spring. It's a white lilac (and I prefer the, well, lilac colored ones, in terms of color) but it smells just as sweet, and it is conveniently located right outside my schoolroom window. And it's in bloom.

This is doubly exciting, because last year we didn't get any blooms on ours at all; we'd pruned the bush too late in the year, and lilacs form their blooms for the following year in late summer. But the wonderful thing about Fairview is that everyone has lilacs. Our next-door neighbors on both sides have them, planted right on the fenceline too! They're everywhere. For the next week or two our entire town will smell of lilacs. I wish I could embed the smell (which the breeze keeps sending through my open window) to share.

Christian and I got all our hoses and sprinklers out and running this morning. It was a wettish early spring (yay!) but we haven't had any rain in weeks and the grass is drying out. Time to be a responsible homeowner. But my reward for that hour of work? Walking by the lilac tree repeatedly. :)

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Now playing: Laura Pausini - Primavera Anticipada (It Is My Song) [Duet With James Blunt]
via FoxyTunes