Large Fierce Mammal

Mrs. LFM photo – click image to enlarge.

I grew up in the small but (then) prosperous town of  Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, in a house across the street from what was generally referred to as “the Minister’s lawn”. A part of the grounds of the Anglican Reverend’s residence, it was a beautifully manicured expanse of table top flatness, and came to be used by the children of Lunenburg’s “Old Town” as a place to express those sorts of childhood revelries as leave permanent grass stains on pants, and semi-permanent ones on the skin of knees and elbows.

Less well known, and lacking in any kind of generally accepted name all its own was what I called “the Lilac Tree”. In the botanical world, the Lilac is wondrous in its variety. I can’t lay claim to the kind of horticultural knowledge that might permit me to positively identify mine, but that doesn’t bother me because my relationship with the Lilac Tree was an emotional one transcending any need for such specificity.

She grew hard against the back wall of the Minister’s garage, facing the lawn on the side opposite the garage door his car went in and out of. She was elliptical in shape and had grown so her branches enwrapped a hollow space within, so through a small circular opening that had formed where the branches reconverged on one another, one could crawl inside and actually stand in a perfumed wonderland that resonated with the steady drone of bees. When not in bloom, the space was silent; filled with the scent of moist earth and green. Yes, green, for that colour has a scent well known to those with nose to smell it.

The front door of my house was about 50 yards or so from the Lilac Tree. I used to like to duck inside when nobody else was looking and for hours, read whatever book I had on the go at the time. A large branch that had grown from the earth back near the garage had travelled parallel to the ground as it thickened so it formed a natural bench for sitting on or use as a back rest, and the whole thing seemed custom built for someone like me. Naturally, I wasn’t the only one who knew about it, but everybody else used it as an easily predictable place of concealment for hide and seek games until they came to know better, and so I was the only one who spent any time there.

Every Spring, I remember eagerly awaiting the Lilac Tree’s scented come hither as the buds of her blossoms formed their clusters, and then slowly changed from green to a dusky purple and thence through blue to a deep pink. The end of the school year and the excitement of impending Summer mimicked Nature’s urgency as Birds returned to mate and raise their young, insects buzzed and flitted to their work, and wildflowers bloomed everywhere. Yet somehow the Lilac Tree was at odds with all this. She waited for just the right time and then, one glorious day I’d step outside and feel my soul filling up with her kiss. Her lusty blossoms beckoned, and I’d pay the Lady a call as soon as the schedule of a school boy would let that happen. In my memories, time held no sway for her, nor for anyone held within her embrace, and I look back on what seem to have been Lilac scented months, even though I know that could not have been the case.

Now, in the final year of my sixth decade of Life, I share a plot of land with three lesser though eminently honourable Lilacs. Shrubs really, and yet each shares an identical blossom and scent with the Lilac Tree of old so that in the past couple of weeks each has slowly released that same heady aroma that takes me back, and that inspired me both to tell you this story and offer, in closing, this small fragment of verse.

The Lilac’s blossom breathes aloud
Her heady scent to sing
A languid contradiction to
The fevered pace of Spring.

Mrs. LFM photo – click image to enlarge.