Vo l . 2 N o . 2 that encourages reminiscing. Weeding, your fingers and limbs work without much mental supervision, leaving space for your mind to wander, a place of emptiness that encourages and encompasses percolating memories. While engaged in motions of fingers picking roots from soil, you might find you imagine how things might have been or how what seems a small event may cause large changes in a person’s life, changes even echoing through later generations. Along the south and west sides of the house, shrubs soften the hard angle between house and ground, hindering the wind here where in spring the Knik races warm and Chinook-like out of the southeast and, during winter, the Matanuska Wind bores up and out of the river channel with a shrillness and pervasive Arctic chill. Warmly indoors, you see the window shiver in the frame, sucked and pushed by the wind as if a membrane not hard and brittle glass. Many conversations have started with a comment about the weather and indeed destructive forces of hurricanes, floods, and even freezes have motivated people to move. Other times though displacement begins with something human-caused—conflicts or wars, or even a technology gone awry, like the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. When times are bad, it’s only natural to begin figuring how to move somewhere safer, friendlier, with opportunities. Sometimes the adult-children go first, the grandparents following later, and I can see how a nostalgia might remain with the grandmother for the home of her youth. It would be a longing for the familiar— the food, flowers, trees, views, and scents—a yearning for snow-in-winter, roses-in-summer, and lilacs-in-spring. Yet another year, I was sympathetic to the lilac’s profuse progeny. Of course, good gardeners would have clipped the faded blooms, but I am not that kind of gardener. That spring, I filled a bucket with lilac shoots and dirt, certain that I would transplant the long-rooted leafy sprouts later. Several weeks had passed when an old pickup drove into our driveway. I expected that the people were lost, or evangelists, and waited as the driver, a middleaged man, opened his door and climbed out. “Hi,” I said, ready with the “we’re not interested and don’t want any” speech. He shrugged slightly in a ‘what can I say’ way and said, “my mother is looking for trees and saw your bush.” An old woman clambered out of the passenger side and walked around the truck. She wore a cotton print dress and head scarf and spoke carefully, pronouncing the single word “bush” then after a pause “flower” and she
79 waved her hands expansively as if holding a bouquet and breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of invisible blooms. In a rush, she finished with the words “home, like home.” Imagine, leaving the country of your youth and ancestors and thinking that you will never return. I had not moved across an ocean to where the language and even the alphabet were different, I had only migrated from Washington state to Alaska, from the desert steppe to the subarctic, from a place of dark, star-filled summer nights to summers of near-perpetual daylight. Eventually, we bought a house with a lilac already well-established and a garden with tiger lilies, delphiniums, and columbines but it is the lilac which reminds me most of my girl-self, of a time when my sisters and I cut and glued paper baskets which we filled with lilacs and on May Day ran and stealthily hung the sweet-smelling blooms on our neighbors’ doors. I don’t know what exactly brought the old woman to Alaska, but from the road she saw the large lilac—Syringa vulgaris—of May Day baskets and Mother’s Day bouquets, with aromatic blooms that attract hummingbirds and butterflies, bees and moths, and now she looked at me hopefully, an old woman in a new life, an old woman who grasped memories like birds to hold for herself and give to her children. “Lilacs,” I said and pointed at the gnarled shrub heavy with pale pink blooms. “Yes. Lilacs,” she repeated, the skin around her eyes crinkling as she smiled. The man smiled, too. From behind the house, I retrieved the container of lilac sprouts. “Here, take these,” I said, holding the bucket out to her. “They’ll grow. Like home.” “Thank you,” she said, her smile widening. “Like home,” she sighed, holding the bucket of lilacs tight. Like home.
Katie Eberhart