One Sure Way Home

Lilacs in Honeoye Falls

A lilac bush grew beside the cellar door of our old house on Main Street, and in May, my mother would pick a big bouquet and put it in a glass vase on the dining room table. The back door and the front door would both be open, and the spring air blew through the length of the house, picking up the fragrance of lilacs, grass, and dark earth. I remember thinking this is what miracles must smell like.

I have just returned from a trip home to Honeoye Falls where the lilacs are blooming like crazy in a spectrum of color from blushed lavender to smoky purple. My favorites are the ones that still remain by the thresholds of collapsing barns and stone steps of windswept farmhouses. Planted years ago by people long gone, the lilacs are willing to tell you their stories if you go alone in early morning or at dusk and stand very still and listen intently.

Upstate New York is full of these places from another time, full of ghosts, and my hometown is no exception. There are ghosts in the cracks of the sidewalks and the bark of the tall maples that line the streets. Ghosts in the birdsong, the empty fields, the night wind rattling the rusty screens. Ghosts in the potato salad and the ginger cookies and the baked beans. Ghosts in the cold streams and the dark lakes and the flowered wallpaper and the dim taverns and the gravel roads.

I still see people, places, things that used to be and are no longer: the elegant irises bedded by the side of the church; the grain mill; the baseball field; Miss Fairchild behind her desk in the little library used mostly for storage now; the concrete bandstand in the park; the Plymouth dealership out on the edge of town; the doorbell factory where Aunt Glady and Aunt Aggie worked. Sometimes I meet people I haven’t seen in years. We look at each other, say a surprised hello, and search for the young face that lies just under the years. And always when I leave and come back to my life here, I’m not sure for a few days what is real and what is imaginary.

The lilacs in my back yard are plentiful this year, perhaps because of the cool, damp spring. I pick a bouquet, put it in a glass vase on the dining table, open the back and front doors, let the spring air blow through my house, and know again for another year what a miracle smells like.

Lilacs are always one sure way home.