It’s nearly four o’clock in the afternoon, first day of June, and sun slants in the windows on the west, that shy globed visitor that daily circles round the house, peering in all the panes, now finds us at poetry. Reading and listening, me and the Farmer’s kids who want to be farmers, all being wooed by words, because dirt-scratchers and stone-pickers are turned, plowed too, by a silver phrase.
Garrison Keillor’s reading the poem for us over at the Writer’s Almanac. We listen to his gravelly voice via laptop speakers, following lyrical words on the screen, Malakai’s finger following mine.
“Why don’t you turn at the next corner,”
she said, “and take another road home.
Let’s go past that farm with all the
different colored lilacs.”
“That’s seven miles out of the way,”
he said. “I wanted to plant the rest
of the corn before evening. We
can look at lilacs some other time.”
How did the poet know? They’ve been dead too long, years. But it’s their faces, my grandparents, emerging from font on a digital screen, her voice from the recording, her telling him to drive around just to look, him gruffly brushing it off, work to be done, corn to be planted.
I smell lilacs.
The ones outside our front door; the ones I cut long ago for that purple profusion for their fiftieth wedding anniversary, that vase full that I held in my lap, so vase and lilacs and water wouldn’t tip, held in my lap with the blooms full in my face all the three long hours cross country, back to to where my grandparents had lived the whole of their lives. Grandma, plate of anniversary cake in hand, had found a seat that evening so that lilacs might sit squarely in front of her. Their fragrance was soft, like her.
The Writer’s Almanac site heralds the date near center, June first matted and framed. It’s only then I remember. Today, June 1st, their wedding anniversary. June 1st, their double wedding, two brothers in tuxes marrying two sisters in veils. I do the math. This would have been their sixty-third. Their brother and sister celebrate alone.
I listen to the poem in it’s entirety four times. Levi counts. “Again, Mom?”
But it’s them! I’ve missed them. So long. And the last line makes me laugh every time, and Shalom on lap laughs too, just because I do. I’m twelve again in the back seat of Grandpa’s Chrysler with the red seats and Grandma’s adamant and Grandpa’s dismissive and their twisting banter ribs me and still I chuckle, twenty years later. Laugh and cry, that feeling of the same vein.
Garrison’s still reading, the fifth time, because I won’t let him stop, just keep clicking replay,
“Well, there they are,” he said,
“and looking pretty scraggly—past
full bloom already. You should
have thought of doing this sooner.”
— and I’m shaking Shalom in laughter again, clicking over to email my sister:
“You simply must listen at Writer’s Almanac today… it’s Grandma and Grandpa. Really. They’re fussing about Lilacs…”
After dinner, one hand in sudsy sink, scouring pots, I dial my sister, cradle phone between shoulder and neck. Did she listen yet? She picks up on the third ring, forgoes the superfluous formality of greeting. The familiarity call display affords.
“So we’re eating potatoes tonight for dinner. And I turn to Dave while I’m mashing and tell him how I never have potatoes without thinking of Grandpa telling me nothing good could ever come of a girl who’d eat potato chips but not her potatoes. You remember him always saying that, Ann?”
“Yeah, I remember…” I smile, press my ear towards shoulder, listening, rinse off the pressure cooker. Has she read my email? Listened to their voices set to poetry?
“I told him and the girls at dinner that I just had Grandma and Grandpa on the brain today. All afternoon, I couldn’t figure out what kept reminding me of them. I told Dave that maybe it was all the lilacs in bloom? I don’t know.”
I lay down the pot. Has she read my email?
“So I spent all dinner reminiscing to the girls about Grandma and Grandpa… and when we’re finally clearing all the plates off the table, that’s when I catch your email…” I shake my head, incredulous at ways mysterious.
‘Oh, an email from Ann’ –what’s that about… and when I click it open there you are over there, reading my mind, with Grandma and Grandpa on your mind. So, don’t you thinks so?”
I can’t find words. They’ve puddled into the sink, all wet and teary.
“Aren’t our souls cojoined?”
Isn’t that what family is?
Lord, blood lines from the past still join hearts now and we beat together, poetry. What could I do to further co-join family today?
Related: Family: Power Source, Part One… Power Source: Part Two
To read the whole of Four Lilacs, or listen to Mr. Keillor reading
Photos: lilacs reminding here
