There’s a lilac bush in bloom along my dog-walking route. I’ve seen the skeleton of it during the colder weather, but wasn’t exactly sure what kind of plant it was until going past the blooms on Wednesday.
I never really took notice of lilacs until I went to school in Western New York. That was the first time I ever felt absolutely enveloped by their perfume. There were bushes growing on nearly every piece of property in Fredonia, totally intoxicating but also sad because once their blooms appeared, it meant the school year had ended and it was nearly time to return “home”, whatever that meant.
A year after graduating, I took a trip to Rochester where many of my friends lived, and attended the Lilac Festival with them, which I’d heard all about. There are plenty of half-blurry photos from that trip, and all the ones that came before it, but the incredible scent of lilacs created a vivid sense memory for me that lasts even a decade later.
It’s amazing how a perfume or scent can be so intrinsically linked to a memory. I know it isn’t a revelation, but it occasionally catches me off guard how the tiniest hint of a smell can ignite such an overwhelming sense of nostalgia that you feel you might come directly off your feet.
While we were walking today, considering the lilac bush I hadn’t realized was a lilac bush, I managed to walk almost in to a second one I’d also missed. The blossoms got everywhere, into Gizmo’s fur and my hair, and I suddenly felt as thought someone had pushed my body back in time to a night not long before college graduation. I had gotten far too drunk - where, I can’t even recall. A party? A bar? - and was being escorted home by a friend. He was a lovely friend, actually, we used to have hamburgers for lunch on Fridays that I’d supply and he’d grill and we’d watch baseball on his TV because he was the only person I knew who had cable. That’s not why, though, if I’m being honest. I just liked talking to him because he was willing to consider my hypotheticals and was just as unsure about graduating as I was.
While we were walking that night, I was talking (at length) about something or other and when I realized he’d stopped responding to me, I turned around to find he’d vanished. I can still feel the panic rise in my chest when I suddenly felt alone and confused as to where I was or how I would get home. And just as quick as the feeling had come on, he reappeared from above me, having climbed into a lilac tree we were passing and was shaking petals down into my hair as he returned to the ground. I woke up the next morning with lilac flowers strewn all over my room, and a whole bloom left on my desk.
I feel compelled, though I’m not sure why, to point out that we were never more than friends. At some point or other a long while after school was over, I decided he was the boy I should have been more than friends with in college because he was nice to me and I never felt so intoxicated by him that I forgot who I was and behaved in ways I lived to regret later. And while I can acknowledge now what a perfectly wonderful friend he was to me, that he looked out for me and spoke to me honestly, I also know that life plays out the way it was always meant to. We were pen pals for a while after school, and then eventually he simply disappeared, as so many school friends do.
I wonder now what became of the boy who climbed the tree, who grilled the burgers, and steadied the lights. What became of the technical director who attracted my fancy moments after my first semester began, or the English major who told me his favorite phrase was “a velvet bag full of broken glass”. I wonder at how they’ve all shrunk into tiny memories for me now - a crunchy leaf, a bite of sandwich, the scent of a flower.
It smelled like spring in Western New York today.
We knew it'd happen eventually.