The Scent Of Wild Lilacs Transports Me Back In Time...

The scent of blooming, wild lilacs, drifting on gentle drafts of warm, spring air bring back fond memories to me of my New England childhood home, my first ‘real’ home where I finally acquired a bedroom of my own.

My happiest memories of my childhood start for me in 1952, which was the year I turned eight, and is the year when my father purchased our first family home that was located on the outskirts of the city of Lynn, Massachusetts. The 'country like' more rural than city street where we moved to was located where the cold, gray city streets of Lynn fell back onto the horizon, and the warm, funky Town of Saugus began.

When I turned eight years old, and my father bought our family our own home across town, the only thing I regretted about moving away from the old neighborhood was leaving St. Patrick’s; both the church and the school. After we moved across town my parents enrolled me in Burrill Elementary, which was the local public school for my new neighborhood.

The home my father bought us was situated on a large parcel of land, which was mostly undeveloped land still in the state that it had been in for centuries. Our back yard led upward; up into an area of hills that went up, and then leveled out only to start climbing again, up, up and then leveling out again. We didn't have city sidewalks on this street. The street where we moved to was paved with blacktop and a cement, half circle shaped gutter ran the length of our 'new' street to carry away both rainfall and snow melt to the sewer entrance located on the city street below.

Off on the other side of the street that was at the end of our street, which was called Oakland Avenue, was Boston Street. Across Boston street was the Saugus River, which I am sure is still flowing today to the Atlantic Ocean carrying excess rainfall and winter snow melt the same as it did back when I was a child living on Oakland Avenue.

Before moving across town I had been a ‘city child' living the life of a city child in an apartment, which was called a ‘flat’ back when I lived in the inner part of Lynn. There were sidewalks to walk on in front of our city apartment, and there was snowfall in the winter on those city sidewalks that needed to be shoveled off.
When my father moved our family to our own home in the more countrified part of Lynn I was transported into a different world from the one I had known and grown up in for the first eight years of my life.

One of the many changes I experienced was there were no sidewalks in front of our new rural home to shovel snow off of.

In addition to the new environment in my outside world was the addition in my life of a new indoor environment in the form of a bedroom of my own, which was one half of a finished attic.

I went from not having any privacy in my life to inheriting a private bedroom that was two or three times the size of ordinary bedrooms! Each of my brothers also got their own bedrooms in our own home.

Everyone in our family was happy while we lived there.

I remember that first summer in my new neighborhood I became entranced with the visual beauty of the woods that started at and were a part of my back yard. The heavy perfume of the wild lilacs growing in my father's wood added to my enchantment.

I took silent possession of these woods.

These woods became my playground for the years from age eight to fifteen, every year, from spring to winter and then back to spring again.

Often during the hot humid days of summer, I would pack charcoal pencils and a pad into my knapsack, and head to the cool refuge of my tree canopied wood. In quiet, shaded areas I often found lily of the valley flowers growing that I would sketch. Delicate silvery white, lace edged bells suspended and drooping on slender stems rising from the soil. On my forays I also often found hot orange colored, bell shaped tiger lily flowers, half hidden within cool earthy smelling, shallow furrows. I soon learned to enjoy both of these hidden flower prizes while they remained in their original homes. Once picked from their original earthen homes, they faded fast and died!

I loved my woods, and all I learned treking through it, listening, watching the creatures and plants living and growing there, taught me about the cycles of life within nature. I loved all the natural lessons of nature that I learned because they showed God’s Love to me, in His miracles of renewal in nature in our world. This was definitely one of the happiest and most learning times of my life.

I have read that during the last Ice Age, glaciers spread over New England with heavy ice flows moving downward with such force that they actually cut off the tops of mountains, and leveled out what was previously land with high mountains. That explains for me the topography of my back yard wood that I loved so much as a child.

The land where my wood existed contained along with all the growing flowers and small creatures living there, many trees, which included pine, birch, chestnut and oak trees. There were large, rounded boulders too that I would climb, many were over 15 feet in height, and must have weighed tons. This wood, my woods was where several dozen large, wild lilac bushes grew; and were visible from our back porch. Both purple and white varieties of lilac populated this area. It was an amazing sight every spring to look up from our back porch, up into my woods, and see the purple and white colors take form on the wild bushes as the heavy hanging clusters of flowers formed. While my visual sense was overwhelmed by the color, my sense of smell was also overwhelmed with the sweet perfume emanating from these bushes that were trimmed only by the forces of nature; hence their wide and tall stature.

During the winter all of my trees and my lilac bushes alike, which were bundled up in my wood, were encased with sparkling fairy like crystals of ice, and often they were packed with heavy snow. So the miracles of rebirth, re-leafing and re-flowering that took place every spring were indeed miracles from God.

For anyone reading this story that has lived only on the hot and dry West Coast of the U.S. it may seem strange to think of rain fall in the summer but that is what it does in New England; it rains during the spring and summer months, and often the rain comes down while the sun is shining.

I remember it raining several times a week during the summers that I lived there. Summers in New England were always hot and humid with sudden drenching bursts of rain that often ended as fast as the storms started. Sometimes loud claps of thunder could be heard with streaks of lightening that would stretch across the now darkened sky looking much like a heavenly release of anger.

Large drops of warm rainwater that I called angel tears, would fall from the darkened clouds hitting the ground; splashing out into many more drops of warm rain spreading outward; then finally soaking into the ground. I loved to walk in the rain back then despite the danger of summer electrical activity. I still love the sound of rain hitting the pavement, hitting my roof, even today.

Lilacs need a lot of water, heat, and they also need shade from the drying sun to thrive. Our wild lilac bushes in my wood had all three conditions. The tall mature trees shaded the many wild bushes with their spring, summer leaved canopy, and the frequent warm summer rains kept the bushes green and lush looking, full of fragrant scent and deep color throughout both the spring and summer months, all of the years that I lived in this home.

I remember during both in the spring and in the summer my mother opening her upstairs, kitchen pantry window, which faced my wood, to allow fresh air to enter the house, and I will always remember the heavy, sweet fragrance of our lilacs drifting through that pantry window; filling our home with their sweet fragrant presence.

This story is my true life memory of where I lived from the age of eight to fifteen; this story is my memory of our New England home that was filled with the sweet scent of wild lilacs every spring and summer. And this story is also my memory of the home my father bought for my family where I finally got both a bedroom and a woods of my own!

I will always remember the joy my whole family felt while we lived in our New England home... My father passed away on Friday March 13, 1959, and I was only fourteen years old. I got to live in my much loved New England home up to six months past my fifteenth birthday. This was when my family moved to New York State, and a whole new adventure awaited me there.

Carol Garnier Dutra

Copyright © 2010 by Carol Garnier Dutra

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