Lilacs

When I went out this morning, I confirmed that my lilac bush has officially stopped blooming. The ground beneath it is covered in strewn petals and the pretty purple has been replaced with brown. 

Ok...rereading those last sentences sounds pretty depressing! I've actually been delighting in my lilac bush for the past two weeks. I look forward to it every spring. It starts blooming right when the school year is in full frenzy mode, and so it always feels like a sign of the better, more relaxing days of summer that are ahead. 

Even better than the sight of the lilacs is their smell. It's so intense--filling my nostrils as soon as I open my back door--yet somehow still light and delicate and not overwhelming. Perfection!

Thinking about the short life of the lilac blooms reminds me of the famous Robert Frost poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

While I love the observation he makes in the first four lines, I've always thought that the second half of the poem is too melancholy, especially if we're thinking about nature. Yes, the blooming lilacs are "gold" and they only last an hour in the scheme of the whole summer. But, if they did last all summer, they wouldn't seem so miraculous to me. It is often novelty and surprise that delights us, and constancy and routine that make us blind to the small wonders of life. To speak to this point, in his essay "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore." (Sorry, the English teacher in me is really coming out this morning!) When things become part of our every day, it can become easy to take them for granted.

Anyway, the lilacs are gone, but there are other delights and pieces of "gold" to be discovered. For instance, this morning I made two hard boiled eggs and when I went to peel them, the shells came right off in long continuous pieces. How often does that happen? It was surprising and delightful! The whole point of this project is to remind myself to be on the look-out for joyful things in my life, both novel and ordinary.