Where Lilacs Still Bloom Read Online Free

strip of red yarn from my apron and tied it to the stem. “The sunlight is perfect to catch the slightest distinction. When I break the bulbs apart this fall, I’ll want to plant this one right next to the other egg-yolk yellow, and that way, they’ll fertilize each other. I might get an even deeper hue.”
    I inhaled their scent. I noted those differences too, marking ones with the most deeply satisfying smell with a white strand of yarn. I thought of my mama. She loved the smell of daffodils. Inhaling a soothing scent from a flower could take away pain, the kind of pain that comes with loss and longing. I urged Frank to inhale, and he stuck his slender nose inside the bloom.
    “They’re all individual to me, Frank. I see each one, unique and perfect as it is, but a few move toward more what I’m imagining than another.”
    I showed him a few more distinctive blooms, noting the size differences as well as color and then found myself kneelingand weeding, my mind soothed by the effort, inhaling scents of heaven. I pulled yarn and marked them for scent and color and hardiness and early or late blooming.
    It would take time to change a tree’s or flower’s habit of being. My father used to say it took thirty days to change a person’s ways. Much longer for a plant. But like people, they can be shaped if the qualities one loves the most are noticed and nurtured. In some ways, I think Frank knew that insight first, as he loved me out of my annoyances from the time I was sixteen and his new bride until now when we partner together to raise our family. I hoped he understood that daffodils gave me more.
    “Where are you off to?” I asked him as he turned, began to step away. “I thought you wanted to know how I see things.” I was irritated with him for flitting from one thing to another like a bee to a bloom.
    He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it. “I’ve been standing here close to an hour watching you seek and find. You just disappeared inside that patch, Huldie.”
    “No,” I said. No to my not realizing he’d been standing there, and no to how much time could have passed. I looked toward the sun.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “I just—”
    “I submit you’re lost in the blooms. Like once you got lost in me.”
    “Oh, Frank.” I stood and kissed his cheek, the hoe against my shoulder between us. “I still get lost in you.”
    Frank gave me a wistful smile, and I swallowed no small level of guilt. I didn’t devote myself to him the way I did to those flowers, but wasn’t that in human nature too? We fall in love, our passions deep and moving, and then we go on to living, the love still strong but different, as babies come and cry and need our loving too. They grow older, and we seek nurture in new places, and what safer place can there be but in a garden?
    Frank walked off toward the barn, and I didn’t know what to say to keep him with me. A hummingbird vibrated past my head looking for sweets. I worked my way back toward the house, calling Bobby with a slap to my knee, hoeing out a few weeds as the dog came running. Was it wrong to find sustenance in creation, to feel pride in seeking those crisp apples? I put my hoe away, took off my hat and decided to bake fresh bread for Frank’s supper. It was the least I could do when he felt my love for him wasn’t as grand as it was for a daffodil. Or an apple. He was wrong, of course, wasn’t he?

    That fall we harvested the apples from my father’s orchard. I gave each apple tree that same scrutiny I gave my daffodils so I could keep shaping and deciding which branches I’d graft where the following year. Baskets sat on the ground, and despitethe work, it was a happy time with my children—all four here on weekends, the oldest two away in Portland attending school during the week. I looked for the largest apples, and on that day in 1900, I saw the fruit of my labors. On the ladder, I pulled a good-sized apple from the stem, rubbed it clean with my