Where Lilacs Still Bloom (34 page)

Over one hundred of my individual varieties were in bloom that year, and we had delegations from cities come who wanted to each choose a variety and name it for their towns. I thought that lovely. City of Kelso, City of Kalama, City of Olympia, City of Gresham, so many more. The article went on to say it had been twenty-five years since I’d read that book about Luther Burbank. Mr. Burbank married again in 1916 and died only ten short years later, and I never got to meet him. But look what had happened in that time. The article listed some of the cultivars I’d developed and named: Mrs. Klager’s Choice, Mrs. Lizzie Mills, Clara, Irvina, R. W. Mills, Fritz. I realized they hadn’t mentioned Delia or Martha. I wrote a letter to the editor correcting that. I didn’t want my children to feel slighted in any way, thinking I’d neglected to name a cultivar for each one.

The weather had been cool, so I fully expected more to bloom the following week, and with all those people having come so far, I imagined they might have missed the best flowering.

But another several hundred more didn’t! The privy was in use all day, and I told Fritz that before next year we’d have to construct another, though I wasn’t certain if this could really continue, this attention to flowers, my flowers, by strangers.

But it did. By 1930, more city delegations came forward requesting lilacs be named for their constituents and planted at the local courthouse or next to the bridge leading into the city. Someone from the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania came that year and took a Klager lilac east.

But then things began to change. Oh, the Northern Pacific kept rolling along, bringing with it free riders who’d wave from open freight doors as they rambled on by. I wondered where they were headed and if they’d find when they got there what they’d been looking for.

Fewer visitors trekked the grounds in the 1930s, what with the economy as it was. I started noticing more hobos along the railroad too and decided to put out boiled eggs and bread for them.

“Mama,” Lizzie complained when she came by one day and I was getting ready to take a plate of egg sandwiches out to the men. I’d listen to their stories, and they’d listen to mine. “Please don’t serve them on the Haviland china!”

“And why not? They deserve as good as any of us. Just circumstances placed them there, bankers and businessmen
making poor decisions all the way in New York and the stock market crashing.”

“Still. They’ll tell everyone else, and you’ll be deluged with people.”

“So long as the chickens lay and I can bake bread, I’ll have something to give them. Besides, they tell me they like stopping here, sniffing the breeze and seeing the greenery and color. Brightens their day. Why, a few even ask for work before they eat, and I always have things for them to do. They make good bucket boys. A couple even asked for starts, though I don’t know what they’ll do with them.”

“They could be dangerous, and Fritz isn’t here during the day.”

“That’s possible. But Nelia’s father comes by often and shows them what to do, and he sets any on their way he thinks might not be savory souls. Most are, though, so my shared lunch is well compensated for.”

When Bertha’s husband, Carl, died, we hosted a huge funeral and I brought the flowers. Carl and Frank had come to Woodland together, best friends they were. His passing alerted me to what would change as years went by. Somehow we’d have to keep their memories alive. For me, the best way to do that was to develop another variety and know that particular one was birthed the year Carl died or the year that Amelia and Solomon died or the year that Fred Wilke was born, so long after his sister. Lilacs were something living to
go on after them. It became my new purpose, to weave someone’s story inside every new cultivar.

I was up to a hundred and fifty varieties now. Still, I had no double white with twelve petals to claim. When that happened, I’d probably quit.

R
uth tried to keep the anxiety from overwhelming her. They had so little money now; prices were high. John’s music lessons had dropped off but for a few of the wealthier families. Ruth gave free lessons to a few of the more promising students who had no money and who spent most of their nonmusic time killing sparrows for meat. Both of her sons lived with them, had to. She’d even turned the backyard into a vegetable garden—digging up all except her lilacs.

“You surely do pamper those flowers,” John Jr. said as she clipped and trimmed, gathered suckers she put in water and would later give away. He’d had to drop out of college—both boys had to—finding odd jobs enough to keep them from the soup lines. Ruth was grateful that she had them under her roof, knew where they were and what trouble they weren’t getting into, because their mother was right there, watching.
But she worried over them too. What mother didn’t feel that sons at home meant she’d failed to properly launch them.

“Yes, I pamper my lilacs. They remind me of the woman who kept them blooming and how she dug them up when high water came and floated them on rafts tied to trees so they weren’t ruined by standing river water. She taught me about persevering and trusting that providence would provide. I’ve needed those lessons. I hope I’ve passed them on to you too.”

John was silent, had always been a bit of a sullen boy, and yet until now, he’d had privileges not known to her or his father growing up. She hoped she hadn’t spoiled them during the good times. Charles loved the dirt, but John didn’t, which was odd for a boy, Ruth thought. He especially didn’t like coming upon slugs—well, who did? At least his fastidiousness kept him cleaner than Charles so she had fewer loads of laundry to do each week.

Maybe she should have told them about working for families in their gardens or taking care of elderly people in order to make ends meet. She hadn’t talked much about her own life, living apart from her parents for most of it, staying with the Klagers through her school years. She’d wanted better for them than what she’d had. But now that everyone struggled, she realized that what she’d had with the Klagers should be celebrated. They should be honored for their kindness, their diligence, the day-to-day commitment to their
family, their farm. Especially Mrs. Hulda who persevered to bring all those varieties to share, self-taught, carrying on even without her Frank beside her.

Ruth imagined what the garden must look like now. A couple of the magazine articles she’d read included photographs. While the iron-shaped garden still adorned the front yard, she also saw how many more plants bloomed, how many different colors of lilacs dotted the greenery. Yellow, pink, magenta, red, purples of various shades. It was stunning. And soothing. She tried to recognize whether her starts were in the photograph, but the pictures were too small.

“Do you remember my telling you about the Klagers?” she asked her son.

“Yeah. Some of it. Mostly about the flowers.”

“I suppose I pamper the lilacs because it takes me back to them,” she said. “She developed these varieties herself. The lilacs represent survival. And that’s what we’re about now, surviving until better times come through.”

And when they do
, Ruth thought,
I’m going to go visit Mrs. Hulda
. She owed it to the woman to tell her face to face how much she’d meant to her, how many lessons she’d taken from the lilacs in her life.

When John came home that day from teaching at the university, new for him since the beginning of the decade, he was upbeat. “There’s talk about a Federal Music Project,” he said. “Maybe years out, but they’ll pay small salaries to
musicians, and we’ll give concerts, for very small fees. There’ll be projects for writers too, perhaps. And artists.”

“That would be … inventive,” Ruth said.

“People don’t have much money to spare, but the arts feed the spirit, Ruthie, they do.”

“Like gardens.”

She stood with her back to the window, watching her husband. It was good to see him looking forward. He caught her smile, spread his arms, an invitation, like the opening of a tulip. She stepped into his embrace, warm and safe in this garden of love.

T
he first storm came on December 5. I’d never seen such rain in all my years. I couldn’t even see the barn for the density of the water. Thunder and lightning didn’t happen often here, but that day, we had both, along with the downpour, a word that seems miniscule to what we endured. Bobby hid under the table, and even though I usually didn’t let the dog and cats stay in the house, that night I did. I didn’t go to bed, stayed up in my rocker listening instead for the siren that might announce a breach in the levee or something else gone wrong at one of the dams built on the Lewis these past years. I dozed in the rocking chair, stoking the fire when I awoke. I could hear Fritz snoring upstairs. My high-school helper Marjorie had gone home. Her parents lived up on the bluffs. I never heard a siren, and in the morning I thought, well, all those dams have been worth it, taxes and all.

By the evening of the second day, the rain let up, and then we had days of the usual rains, soft, misty ones that allow walking without umbrellas. A few sunbreaks in between. I had puddles of standing water in the yard, but any pooling near the roots of my plants I channeled with my shovel, draining them away from the lilacs especially. I was glad we lived close enough to town to walk for a few groceries we might need, because the roads would be slick snakes of mud. The main paved road south toward Portland, it was said, had water over it in places. I checked my new rain gauge. Two and one half inches in the past day. The weather warmed up too, above freezing, so at least we didn’t have snow. Of course that meant snow would be melting in the high country, sending the melt to the Lewis and Columbia Rivers. Nothing to do about it, but I thought maybe we should dig up lilacs, just in case.

I heard on the radio that the coast had been wrecked with seventy-mile-an-hour winds along with all that rain. I was glad there was a hundred miles between us and the onset of that storm, so it had a few hours to wear itself out. Aberdeen and Hoquiam, coastal cities, had two to six feet of water standing, or so they reported. I looked at the wall trying to imagine water that high coming into my house.

The rivers crested on December 10. Kelso, north of us, reported major flooding, and we learned a railroad bridge collapsed. I looked at the railroad grade next to the house and
didn’t see seepage, but it was saturated from all the rain just as the levee along the Lewis was. If we got dry weather, we’d be all right. That’s what Fritz told me, and I agreed.

On the seventeenth, we had another storm, pouring rain into every crack and corner. I noticed a leak in the kitchen and set a pot to catch it. Rainwater is good for plants, but I didn’t like collecting it inside my house. Heavy rain continued for days, and when it lessened, we waited in the misty rain for word about when they thought the rivers would crest again.

On December 22, a dam at the headwaters of the Lewis broke, and all that rain and snowmelt headed toward Merwin Dam on the Lewis River. Sirens told us to evacuate, and we learned that they were going to open the gates at the Merwin Dam, hoping to let water through, controlled; but then something happened, and they couldn’t get the gates closed, or the water couldn’t be controlled, and all that water and debris and logs and trees just kept coming our way. The Lewis River ran ten feet above what it had ever run before, and it was heading toward Woodland.

There is nothing so alarming to a farmer or a homeowner or businessman as seeing water rising, pouring, flattening out around all you’ve worked for all your life. The rushing river demolished dikes 11 and 5. By then, Fritz and Bobby, the chickens and the cats and I were at Bertha’s, up on Martin’s Bluff. It was a good thing, because Woodland—and our
farm—was underwater. We could see portions of our village, rooftops mostly, from the grade at Martin’s Bluff. The bottoms of barns that hadn’t floated away were left to the imagination. Many of the roofs had rocks on top hoping to keep them secured, with second-story windows peeking out like eyes under hats. The islands on the Columbia were gone. I looked across that river and could see that the town of St. Helens was underwater too.