We were looking at houses in Front Royal, a small Virginia town sixty miles west of Washington DC at the confluence of the North and South forks of the Shenandoah River and tucked at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
This sounds lovely, but it used to be called Helltown, and the moniker was not a misnomer like Greenland; it was an accurate description of the townsfolk and traders under the influence of the ubiquitous homebrew. Even now, centuries later, most inhabitants of Front Royal lived there because their parents had lived there and so on as far back as anyone could remember.
This was quite a change after the transience and broader cultural perspective of northern Virginia.
We needed to get out of our current rental, now straining the budget beyond its limits after unforeseen changes at my father’s company led to a substantial pay decrease.
Finding an inexpensive house that fit our family of eight, even in Front Royal, was proving a challenge. We were touring a dark, sullen, brick ranch home with few windows and little natural light. Much of its usable space was in the even darker basement. Even the realtor struggled to stay positive as she described its features. Missi and I were looking at each other in measured horror.
This could be our home.
The tour nearly complete, the realtor led us into the long, narrow back yard. A large lilac bush nearly covered the length of the tall, dark fence. The heady scent of its blossoms wafted through the doorway. We shared another glance.
This could be our home.
I was swept back to my first encounter with lilacs in Chantilly.
We had a surprising number of neighborhood friends in Chantilly. The meadow on the far side of our stream in backed up to a row of houses, each one—incredibly—with children our age.
We and the other neighborhood kids played most often at Kelly and Lauren’s house. They were a little bit older than us but friendly and kind. They had a trampoline and a tiny dog. They invited us to Lauren’s birthday party where I learned for the first time of shaving cream and participated in a confusing but exhilarating shaving cream fight. Two houses down the street from them, just before the street dead-ended into the neighborhood park with its sledding hill of epic proportions, lived their cousin Mark.
Between the two houses lived Sera and her younger brother.
The sole ornament in the front yard was a crab apple tree that yearly deposited its mealy, inedible fruit in the sparse grass to decompose slowly until it was buried beneath next year’s crop. One did not go barefoot in that particular yard. Tonka trucks littered the driveway.
The wall of smoke hit before the front door was fully open. Every time I saw Sera’s mother, she was lying on their couch, just inside the front door, a cigarette perched between two fingers while with the others she gripped a thick paperback novel. Although the novels changed, their covers did not; on each were entwined a muscled, bronze-chested man and a woman with flowing hair and open bodice.
She was passively friendly towards us, but I was afraid of her. There was no telling when or why she would yell at Sera. When Sera’s dad was home, the smoke doubled and so did the chance for a fight. The unpredictability was terrifying.
The living room was dark, cluttered, claustrophobic. The Christmas tree stood in the corner until July. The television blared incessantly. It was here that I watched Arachnophobia and The Addams Family.
Once, after Sera served us water in old jam jars pulled from cupboards without doors, her mother yelling about getting dishes dirty, Sera invited us to slip out the back door with her to escape.
We followed her down crumbling concrete steps into an oasis. It was quiet, calm, lovely. Eclipsing the yard—packed dirt with a few rusty nails and scattered shards of blue glass—were cascading blossoms, sweet and fresh and smoky purple. I remember the euphoric release of fleeing that dark, low house, of making it through and out. We stood clustered and silent by the shivering lilac bush, inhaling relief, exhaling anxiety until our legs felt strong and our lungs felt pure.
We never told my mother about Sera’s mom, but after coming home from Sera’s house, I was always so thankful for my own mother and our clean, well-kept home, beautiful books, and generally peaceful family.
I kissed a boy one spring day—a glancing but heartfelt kiss—on a street corner under a lilac bush.
The lilacs were a smear of purple across my vision, their scent strong, almost throat-achingly sweet; the rhythmic sound of bees thrummed in the background.
It was the most chaste and absurd little kiss. A peck is being generous.
Yet could it be otherwise?
A single kiss is like a single lilac blossom. Lovely but out of context. And the bees knew—a single pentagon isn’t honeycomb, but it’s a start.
A first kiss, a single kiss, is missing all the connections and echoes, harmonies and repetitions, all the perspectives seen from different angles that make a kiss truly sweet, no flowers needed. The familiarity and yet the surprise. The recognition and the delight.
We were never meant to be alone and we were never meant to have just one kiss.
In the intervening years between that first kiss and our wedding, years full of confusion and hardship and sorrow imposed on us by the courtship culture in which we were raised, purple became the color of good cheer to me. Of chosen gladness. Of abiding, long-suffering joy.
It was only fitting then, that at my wedding, I walked into my marriage down an aisle lined with, overflowing with, rich purple lilacs. This time, there would be not a single blossom but a profusion, a riot of blossoms, heaped up and running over.
When my daughter was four, we ate honeycomb toast sitting on a quilt spread over the sun-drenched hill behind our butter-yellow house.
We savored the sunlight together, breathing the heavy, heady fragrance of lilacs growing thick behind us, dodging the flight of the bees bumbling between dandelions and lilac blossoms, even as our fingers were sticky with the results of their humble, unceasing efforts—slices of honeycomb piled over golden, home-made butter slathered over thick, toasted bread.
We read books aloud, I squinting at the sun-bright pages, she creating dandelion chains.
We peeled and peered under the thin topsoil that rested on the crest of the boulders in our small slice of the Alleghany highlands, finding spindly roots and pillbugs and feeling the sudden desire to tear every inch of topsoil away to let these cool stones feel the warm weight of the sun.
Even when shadows lengthened around us, we lived in the light together. Made our own light together. Became light to each other.
A light heart lives long, and I believe we will finish as we started—surrounded by sunlight and beauty, flowers and gladness, and always, the homely pleasures of good books and thick toast.
Rachel Brown
enjoys sipping tea, savoring good books, and spending time outside.
She is daily inspired to live more deeply and love more fully by her husband and two children.
3 Responses
Beautiful…thanks for sharing your story!
As always, amazing!
I love these stories so much! Your writing and content is beautiful.