The lilacs are blooming, and a walk through the village is sweetly scented. An olfactory reminder that summer is near and a memory trigger that floats me back to months of May prior. I drift to my first May living in northern Michigan and remember biking up and down the alleyways. On these spring bike rides, I first discovered that many of our little yards have lilacs lining them: privacy borders that invite you to lean in and breathe deeply. Now, seven years later, I live two lots east of where I lived that first spring; the lilacs in my current yard once invited me to trespass to inhale the fragrance.
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Last year, I walked these streets with my baby in a bassinet and came home to trim the now-overgrown lilac between my old house and my new home. I tucked the flowering branches in the stroller to carry them to the house, where I made lilac sugar and syrup, bringing their scent into our house as long as they were in bloom. It was our first spring living in this house, likely of many. Decades if we are lucky. A lifetime.
In high school, one of my best friends drew me a card on my birthday, always at the height of lilac season, that said, “You think the lilacs bloom for you, but maybe the lilacs think you bloom for them.” Twenty years later, I haven’t forgotten his cheesy words. While at the time, the words were the perfect tool for making my 17-year-old self feel special and valued, remembering then now makes me think something else–that I am simply one part of nature. I do not own it; it does not owe me a thing. On the other hand, I owe the earth everything, cycling through the seasons just like every flowering bush and towering tree I have lived alongside my whole life.
Turning again to lilac season–the cusp of spring bursting into summer–I again turn another year older. I cannot help but notice the cyclical nature of it all, the routines that have become deeply rooted, especially over the last seven years of living on the same street. Beginning in May, my mornings are split between garden tending and walks in the wet sand on the beach. As the sun sinks low this time of year, we ride our bikes around the village.
Yesterday, I performed my yearly ritual of swimming in Lake Michigan on my birthday. I have done this on May 22 every year for a decade. This year was different, as I gathered with my cold water swimming pals. In years past, my birthday dips have been chaotic and rushed. Yesterday, I walked in slowly as I have all winter. I didn’t wear the neoprene booties or gloves I wore in the coldest months. When I was ready, my friend Brianne counted down and then, we both dunked under.
Somewhere in the last decade, I read Karen Armstrong’s memoir, The Spiral Staircase. Since then, whenever patterns become repetitious, I cannot help but imagine myself climbing a spiral staircase, turning again to repeat the same rituals, learning the same lessons, but with a different context and different life experience as the backdrop. The other day, while driving, while noting that here I was again at a new year, the lilacs blooming, the rhododendron slowly opening–both such fleeting flowers–I wondered if instead of climbing a spiral staircase, I am instead circling the drain. Perhaps a morbid thought, but what are birthdays for other than considering our mortality?
The other day, I told a new friend that I am an entirely different person since moving to northern Michigan. As I said it, I considered how similar the resulting shifts were to my transition to parenthood. While my personality is essentially the same (for better or worse), my priorities shift with each iteration of coming home. Both made me softer: the Lake first smoothing out my most obvious edges in the way it does with stones, and now my children toss me as if in a tumbler, speeding up the process I once approached leisurely—my impatience, my short fuse, my selfishness, all illuminated and chiseled down each day. What remains is a gentler version of me, yet somehow more solid. Determined, yet more forgiving than I once was–of others and myself.
I turn again, another birthday. Thirty-six. I am again expanding the garden. I still walk the beach in the mornings, holding ancient stones in my hands, perhaps to be reminded that there will always be edges to smooth, that even if I lived forever, I’d have work to do.
My son told me this week while we planted flowers in the garden, “I wish I were a raindrop. Then I wouldn’t die. I would go into the ground and go back into the sky.” The poetry of a four-year-old. “You’re right,” I said, “a raindrop is part of the water cycle. Do you think maybe we are part of a cycle, too?” He didn’t seem to think so and, despite his wish to be a raindrop, did not seem overly bothered by his thoughts. I cannot stop thinking about it, though. What a beautiful image, the raindrop in the water cycle. What a thoughtful consideration for how something small lives on. The tiny raindrop which, when collected, forms bodies of water that nourish the world.
Like water, we are merely the channel through which energy moves, energy shifting through individual waves that together, form something even more significant. I don’t know what happens when we die, where all that energy goes, but I imagine it somehow rolls into the next wave.
For now, I put my energy into the garden, my children, and my relationships. If I am careful, I can hope the ripple effects are largely positive. In some number of years–50 or 100, maybe less–no one will even know I was here, except the oak trees I planted, the dirt under the garden I cared for. My children may say my name enough to their children or neighbors that some part of me remains, but it is only energy that lives on. The resonant waves tapping the store, the stones rolling and rolling.
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Thank you for being here. It is such a treat to connect with you in this way each week. I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to leave a comment or reply to this email to send me a note. Have a wonderful weekend!
Cheers,
Mae