Where Lilacs Still Bloom (28 page)

“Proper chaperoning is all.” I punched the feather pillow.

I listened to the low murmuring downstairs, wishing I could make out sounds coming up the stairwell, but I couldn’t. Finally, I heard the door close and Lizzie make a phone call, then she sauntered up the stairs.

“Mama, are you awake?” Lizzie knocked at the door.

“You couldn’t keep her down if she was dead,” Frank said.

“Come in, come in.” I sat up. “You have news?”

“Roy asked me to marry him. We set a date in March. Will that be all right? I know it isn’t very far away, but things get busy for him at the store after that, and I know they do here too with your garden.”

“Lizzie. Don’t worry about our garden. You set the date any time you wish, and tell us what you’d like for flowers. We’ll push them in the sun porch to have good blooms.”

“Crocus, Mama. I’d like blue crocus, just a small bouquet for Martha and Delia and me to carry.”

“Your sisters already know?”

Martha stuck her head around the corner. “Don’t be upset just because we all knew that tonight was the night, Mama. We weren’t sure you could keep the bubbling in your smile from letting Roy know that everyone knew.”

“I can keep a secret,” I huffed.

Lizzie hugged me. “I know you can. But Martha’s right. You wear your emotions on your face, and I didn’t want Roy to have second thoughts about maybe being swooped and smothered by this family of ours. We don’t do much lightly, you know.”

“Living abundantly, that’s what we’re charged with,” I said. I was tickled for Lizzie and Roy Mills. I told Frank as much after everything settled down, with Lizzie and Martha together going to the tack room to inform Fritz.

“You’re pure, Huldie. One of a kind,” Frank told me. “You have not one wit of guile inside of you. You wouldn’t have been able to stop yourself from greeting Roy differently, just knowing he’d soon be family. It’s how you are, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. But Lizzie, well, she wanted this to be her night, and I submit, a man can get chilled feet even when he’s looking forward to warm socks to put them into.”

“I guess,” I said.

“You’ve a compassionate heart. And the best thing about you is that you don’t carry hurt around for long. You turn it
into something good, maybe even a deeper caring than what you might have before the hurt.”

“When did you get so wise?” I buttoned up the top button on his long underwear. The wood heat from the kitchen didn’t rise all that much to the second floor, and it was cold outside.

“Been living with you all these years. Some of your wisdom has to rub off eventually.” He pulled up the crazy quilt with its velvets and wool pieces stitched together. I snuggled up next to him in my flannel gown, the comfort of ages resting in his sleeping sighs. I put my cold feet against him, and he let me.

I didn’t fall asleep right away. Instead, I thanked God for a fine husband, a grand family. I thanked Him that my children were friends to one another and that He had given two of them another person to love and grow old with. I prayed they would grow old together, as Frank and I were, and that the loss of my sons-in-law so soon after their marriages would not repeat itself in my daughters’ lives. And then I thanked Him for being there with us through it all, keeping the promise that we do not ever walk in darkness without light to reveal the next steps.

I hoped Roy and Lizzie would consider living with us after they married, just as Frank and I had lived with my parents for several years. I’d made comments about how nice it would be to have another grandchild born in this room,
but Lizzie had remained quiet. I should have prayed for patience. Instead, I prayed that Martha would find a suitor to her liking and Fritz would settle down too. We could add on to the house, if need be. I would move the lilacs to make room.

Not much was in bloom on March 9, 1909, when Lizzie and Roy Mills spoke their vows. (It was two days after Luther Burbank’s birthday.) But we did indeed have crocuses and just a few daffodils budding out. The lilacs with their heart-shaped glossy leaves and buds looked ready, but they hadn’t popped, that spring being cooler than normal and rain having poured twenty-eight days of the last thirty-two. Lizzie chose a small wedding with just family and a few of Roy’s friends, including Dr. Hoffman. No music students, no neighbors other than family, of course.

We listened to the vows and drove back to the farm, all of us. I remembered Martha telling me at the girls’ first weddings how those ancient gods hated it when mortals looked too happy without their help. She called it hubris. Silly, I know, but every now and then, Barney Reed’s chattering about my work made me wonder if what I did in my garden changing lilacs really did offend God, and if so, would He find a way to punish my hubris yet again.

As we neared the farm, I decided such unhealthy thoughts
should be set aside, not pondered on a daughter’s wedding day. Instead, I vowed to speak of them with the reverend, soon.

My sisters had left the church earlier and had already set out dishes of food. Martha quickly joined as Nelia dashed around, pouring coffee for the men. I watched my daughter with her new husband, smiling, open as a lily, and I was so grateful. Then Lizzie sat down at the piano, adding something special to the reception at our house.

“This is a composition I’ve been working on for a while. I want to play it for my new husband.” Roy’s faced turned a lovely shade of red—the very color I wish I could get a lilac to give me. “I call it ‘Take His Hand.’ ” I recognized a few sections as portions she’d worked on, but I had never heard it all put together. We all applauded when she finished. Roy bent down and whispered in her ear, and she laughed, a sound as free and open as a brook. Irvina scurried up beside her and began one-finger pounding.

“Your next student,” Edmond said before Delia whisked her daughter away to laughter.

When Lizzie and I were alone upstairs, as she changed from her wedding dress to a traveling frock, I asked her if it was Fred’s song she’d played.

“It started out to be for him, but as time went on, I realized that music speaks to the living not the dead. Fred would have wanted me to sing for the living. So the song is about
taking the hand of a true love and going as far as you’re allowed, and then having the courage to believe you can take another when the time is right.”

“That’s beautiful,” I said. It was.

Later that day, we waved good-bye as the couple drove off in their new Model T Ford. They planned a honeymoon trip to California, where Roy “promised” Lizzie it wouldn’t be raining.

“I hate to see them go,” I told Frank as we stood on the porch, and I chewed on the side of my finger. I hadn’t done that for years.

“They need time alone.” Frank took my hand in his and held it, then moved me to lean against him, his arms around me.

“Oh, I know. Of course they need that. I just mean they’re leaving us.” I sighed. “I wish they’d consider staying on here. I put out enough hints. I guess Roy wants to surprise Lizzie when they get back as to where they’re going to make their home. They certainly can’t move into the boarding house!”

“They could. But they won’t.” I turned to look at him. He had that little grin, and he wiggled his nose at me.

“What do you know that I don’t?” I pulled away from him, poked him in his ribs. “Tell me.”

“They’re coming here to live, Huldie. At least for a while. Lizzie wanted me to wait to tell you until after they’d gone so you’d have something to look forward to.”

“I always have something to look forward to.” I laughed, then added, “I’m a gardener.”

Lizzie came downstairs one morning in June to tell me that she thought she might be with child.

“Lizzie!” I said. “That’s wonderful. When?”

“At Christmas time, if we’ve calculated right.”

I counted on my fingers. I shouldn’t have, but a December birth was right in line with an early March wedding. Every mother is relieved about such details as that.

“Oh, that’s so good. Best to get right on it and have that family. It’ll be like when you Kinder were young and we all lived with my parents. I’ll sew her christening dress. Make a quilt too.” My cup was full.

“You don’t know that it’ll be a ‘she,’ ” Lizzie said, adding, “We’ll have the baby here, Mama.”

“Well, I should hope,” I said.

“But we’ll be moving into our own house soon.”

“You will?”

“You know I’ll come by every day. I’ve got my rhododendron hybrids to keep track of.”

I felt as deflated as an old feather pillow. But I didn’t resist. At least she’d told me, hadn’t kept it a secret so everyone else before me knew. “You’ve already told your sister and father, I suppose.” I bit at the side of my finger.

“You’re the second. I only told Roy this morning.”

“Fritz can move back into the house, this way. I’m sure he’ll like that. I never felt good about his being out there alone in the tack room.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, Mama. He’s got quite a parlor out there, and no one bothers him. He might not like sharing snores with you and Papa and Martha again.”

“We don’t always get everything we want,” I said, though I didn’t really believe that.

A blizzard roared on December 9 when William Mills entered the world. The next morning, a rare snowfall carpeted the ground, covering the garden but leaving ornamental rocks and urns exposed. I pulled on my boots and coat and let Frank sleep. All our cows were dry, so he didn’t have to make the two-mile trek to the Bottoms twice a day now. Instead, he read and looked at garden catalogs with me. I would have liked to stay in bed myself, snuggled up next to him, but the fire was out, and that baby would need a good warm stove.

I pulled my gloves on and went to the woodshed to let the cats and Bobby out. I loaded my arms with wood and told Bobby to bring the kindling. Nelia and Fritz had been working with that dog to do tricks, and he’d picked up “kindling,” carrying a couple of the thinner pieces of fir in his mouth while I trudged through the powdery snow toward the house.
Kittens mewed and purred and followed me up the back steps with dainty feet not accustomed to snow. I stamped my feet on the back porch and dropped the logs in the wood box, took the kindling from Bobby’s mouth, and shooed him inside with the cats rolling back and forth, tails up, mouths open looking for their goodies. “In a minute. Let’s have a little patience.”

Before stepping inside, I turned to look out at my lilacs. Snow powdered the south side of the branches, making a picture of black etched against white. They could look so dead in winter, those shrubs. But spring would come. That was the promise, that spring would always come and with it new life.

I heard William crying in his mother’s arms and then the silence of a baby fed, a new family making their way. Frank stood in the kitchen. “I’ll start the fire.”

My heart could fill no more.