Where Lilacs Still Bloom (38 page)

She was right. I used my hoe to balance in the yard, my cane everywhere else.

“You’re rebuilding too,” I said. “Roy’s store’s got water in the basement still, and there’s work to do at your house. You don’t have time for looking after me. Besides, I sleep best in my own bed. Mold I can live with, at least a little of it. And putting my hands in dirt, that’s healing, Lizzie. You know that. I’ll just have a few pansies and such in pots on the porch.” She nodded. “I remember once Martha telling me about some word called
therapy
, what people were saying was a way to move toward healing without herbs and medicines and such. It’s a word that means a service, attending. ‘I wait upon,’ Martha said. So I wait upon the Lord to lead me back into service, back into ‘attending’ as He wants. Maybe just a
few plants on my sun porch. Not the garden, no, I agree. But I need to go home.”

“Will you let us convert the parlor into a bedroom, so at least you won’t be going up and down the stairs? And put in indoor plumbing, so you can avoid the privy?” Lizzie said.

“Well, all right.”

“And you can’t be alone here. Irvina said she’d come, she and her Mac.”

“Or I could get another high-school girl to help. Either way, the garden is done. The rivers have won.”

“I didn’t know it was a competition, Mama,” Lizzie said.

“I only meant that the rivers have been my adversary since I first began; the rivers and rabbits and coyotes and moles and whatnot, all wanting part of my garden.” I shook my head. “And for what have I struggled against them? To grow a few lilacs.”

“You’re older; you could have a heart attack too, you know.”

“I deserve it,” I said.

“Mama!”

I smiled at her when she shook her finger at me. “I have to have a little time to remember all that Fritz and I did on that place after the last flood.”

I needed to honor him with my memories, my son who had stayed faithful to me and even at the end had been the lift in my spirit that said we could start again. Maybe he’d understand that flowers on the porch could be enough.

The first starts arrived by mail. Cornelia sent them, all packed with roots covered with dirt and kept moist by a piece of tarp wrapped around them. “For your garden,” she wrote. “I heard you lost your lilacs.”

Well, that was sweet
. I set them in a tub on the porch. A few days later Nelia drove up with Benson, and she had several starts taken from Jasmine’s grave, she said. Her father had kept them living. And he’d gotten a few cultivars of other varieties I’d given him for helping out, and she brought starts of those too. Nelia helped the high-school girl and me put water in tubs. I didn’t need girls now for garden help, but it was still nice to share a conversation with someone over breakfast, wish sweet dreams when we turned off the lights at night.

“We could just plant them,” Nelia said.

“Oh, no, they’d be lonesome out there. Let’s just leave them here.” I sat in the rocker, not sure what to do.

Then cultivars from the garden club in Oregon arrived. I guess they checked with the mayor who told them the garden had been wiped out. City lilacs, as I think of them, showed up too, some as full bushes dug up and brought by truck from Kelso and Kalama, Gresham, and Silverton. Then Ruth wrote and sent starts from her Chrystle graduation lilac and others I’d sent her through the years. My grandchildren all brought a start from their gifted plants. Then the Snyder family called long distance to say they’d heard about the
flood and wanted to send starts from the lilac planted at Arnold Arboretum bearing my name. Shelly said she’d contacted Lowthorpe School, and they had Klagers there and would send seeds next year.

“Lizzie!” I said into the phone that worked again. “You need to come over here. It’s … You won’t believe … Something miraculous is happening.”

The banker, the chief of police, that Japanese artist now living in New York, the son of the jeweler who had passed on too, they all sent cultivars of different varieties and then came others, trickling in, from people who’d visited. Treasures appeared, from children whose parents said they had Klager lilacs in their backyard picked up as discards one sunny afternoon outside our gate. Dozens and dozens of lilacs arrived, so many the postman said he’d have to find a special room to hold them when the mail truck delivered them too late in the day.

My porch overflowed.

Lizzie’s eyes gazed across all the starts that my new high-school girl had put into galvanized buckets sitting like lily pads in the pool of what had once been my garden. But there were bulbs too and seeds and still more lilacs I could yet work with a new variety. It might take a few years, but I thought I might even get the twelve petal double creamy white again. It would just take time.

The three Lemoine that started my adventure so long ago were gone, but the offspring, the next generations, were
coming back to me as gifts! My Favorite, Martha’s creamy white with the yellow center, so many more! I had no hope that I’d get all 254 varieties back, but the numbers didn’t matter. It was the circle of service coming full, all of those starts “attended” through the years in yards by generations of people I neither knew nor met.

“We have to plant them,” I said. “I don’t know how we’ll keep them up, but we have to.”

Lizzie nodded. “It is amazing, just amazing.” She had tears in her eyes.

“We might be ready for Lilac Days by 1950,” I told her.

“Nineteen fifty?” Lizzie said. “That’s only two years away.”

“We’ll tell everyone of how the lilacs were restored by people giving them back. I am so humbled, so humbled.” I was crying too. “I will remain here where I belong. I will devote the rest of my life in rebuilding the garden. I have faith!” I said.

My daughter and grandchildren would help. I’d begin with the flatiron-shaped patch at the front by the porch: the symbol of beauty and work, what a garden is all about as it gives to its gardener, as it gives to the rest of the world.

L
etter for you, Grandma.” Irvina picked the envelope from my latest Bobby’s mouth, where he’d learned to carry it, saving me a few steps. The child went back to ironing my sheets, well, hers too. There are standards to keep, after all, though of late I wished she’d quit piddling with work and just sit a spell with me.

I looked at the postmark on the envelope. August 21, 1950. “It’s from Santa Rosa, California. I don’t know anyone down that way.”

We’d had our grand opening of the Lilac Days earlier that spring with several thousand people coming by, marveling at the recovery. We showed photographs of what it had looked like after the flood. Every building in town posted pictures, their tenants knowing it’s important to remember both the hard times and how we came through them. The
tour guides told stories of people returning lilac varieties, asking each group if anyone might have a start they’d gotten years previous, and if so, might we have a snip of it. It was a grand day, and all of Woodland could feel pride in what they’d done helping restore the community to its quiet splendor, lilac fragrance wafting over Horseshoe Lake and all the town proper. On the tours I led with my cane, I always reminded them that “life is worthwhile when it holds some beauty. It needn’t be flowers. It can be helping other people—that’s beautiful.”

I held the letter. It was a fat packet. A return address didn’t include the sender’s name. I slipped my old yellowed nail along the glue, and it flipped open. Inside was a paper packet with seeds. And a letter.

The Washington State Federation of Garden Clubs held their annual meeting of 1958 in Seattle, and I was to receive their prestigious award. Lizzie couldn’t drive me this time; she passed on in 1956. I’d outlived all my children and my brothers and sisters too. I did wonder now and then about Barney Reed suggesting I wasn’t doing the Lord’s work in my garden and if the price I paid was burying so many of those I loved. But my father’s words came to me with greater force, and I found no sin in pursuing what I loved and embellishing beauty and giving the results away. Suffering, I decided, happened, and so did good things, and the issue of God’s power was not so much in questioning why He didn’t stop floods or death but in all the rest of the time when He showed us how to be hospitable, generous, and loving.

I took special pleasure in receiving the Washington State Horticultural Award. They let me tell stories of a few lilac varieties, the highs and lows of gardening they related to. I made them laugh, which I always like to hear, then answered questions about the restoration after the flood and
was careful not to go on too long the way we old women who love to talk about our gardens can. I wished my Frank was here to see the award. I said as much, and then tears pressed against my eyes when the federation president said it was astounding that I developed all those varieties from just three surviving Lemoine.

Astounding, yes; and a miracle when a young mother with faith felt worthy enough to keep lilacs blooming.

Hulda’s story continued on past 1958. For two more years, she worked in her garden. After Fritz’s death, she invited her granddaughter Irvina and her husband, Mac Van Eaton, to live with her and take care of her, and upon her death she would give them the farm. These younger relatives happily did so. Not long after Irvina’s death at the age of fifty-one, Mac remarried. He and his new wife, Edith, remained caring for Hulda until she died in 1960, two months before her ninety-seventh birthday. Hulda’s later years included care from family but especially three generous women: Elma, her beloved niece; Irvina, her granddaughter; and following Irvina’s death, Edith, her grandson-in-law’s second wife.

For some time after Hulda’s death, Mac and Edith stayed on in the house until their age and health required that they reluctantly sell. The gardens became overgrown. No one came for Lilac Days anymore without the hope of seeing Hulda’s strong frame beside her beloved flatiron garden. A developer moved into the old farmhouse where all of Hulda’s grandchildren were born, but he had no interest in the garden. Fewer people remembered her amazing gifts; her life and her work faded into history. Then came the rumor that the land was to become apartments, and the house and garden would be gone forever.

Ruth Wendt, in her delightful book
Those Wonderful, Annoying, Industrious, Ambitious, Busy, Stubborn, Determined, Caring, Clever, Talented, Gracious, Intelligent, Focused Women: The Story of the Hulda Klager Lilac Society
, chronicles how a group of dedicated women, including Alice Wallace Schiewe, granddaughter of Hulda’s sister, Bertha; descendant Betty Mills; Ruth Lane; Irene Stuller; Crystal Schultz; and Daisy Grotvik—all Woodland Garden Club women—put their heads together and worked tirelessly to reclaim the Klager property and help establish the Hulda Klager Lilac Gardens. Using all those adjectives in the title of Ruth Wendt’s book, the women saved the gardens and began the restoration to what is seen today, bringing to mind John Wesley’s words about passion and people coming to watch one burn. These women also spearheaded the National Historic Site designation for the gardens, a task completed in 1975. The gardens have welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors ever since.