Where Lilacs Still Bloom

  “I wish I had some of his energy,” Frank told me. We listened to crickets chirping in the early April twilight as we walked through the gardens, a soft misting rain covering us, collecting on Frank’s hat like silver sequins. I checked the lilac buds, hoping they’d be in bloom by Planter’s Day. The levee didn’t hold in 1920 when it was built; but it did last year, the first year without water covering the fields. I looked forward to Planter’s Day this year. “I think they’ll bloom,” I told Frank. “But you can’t push them. Just have to be patient.”

  He nodded. “So you’ve told me now these many years.”

  He looked tired, I thought, and I mentioned that. “Might be time to sell those cows. You are nearly seventy, you know.”

  “I know. But if I didn’t have those cows to milk, you’d put me to work right here. Who knows how many beds you’d have me dig for that next generation of lilacs you have in mind.” He grinned.

  “Just lilacs. I still want that twelve-petal double white.”

  “I submit, you’ll get it,” he said, then stopped.

  “What is it?”

  He turned to me with the strangest look on his face, started to speak. His face was as pale as a piano key. He grabbed at his throat and sank to the ground.

  “Frank! Frank, what’s wrong?” My heart pounded, my breath short. Already my hands felt clammy, as though they knew what I couldn’t say. “Frank!” I shook him. Wet grass stuck to his face where he’d fallen. I picked it off. “Fritz! Fritz! It’s your father. Come! Call Dr. Hoffman! Oh, Frank, oh no, not now, not now.” I knelt beside him and cradled his still body in my arms until all the warmth of him had gone, leaving me cold and alone.

  I moved through the following days and weeks without direction. Nelia came down from Seattle where she worked at Swedish Hospital and stayed a few days. The girls stopped by every day to see that I ate something, not that I cared to. I’d spent many a day alone while Frank was working with the cows and whatnot, but now the time unaided felt unfinished, as though I’d started repotting a flower and stopped halfway through, not sure why I would want to go on. I hadn’t realized how much a part of my day Frank was, even when he wasn’t here. All the things I wanted to share with him at twilight were made brighter by anticipating my telling him, more comforting from his hearing it. I kept wondering where he was.

  Now I couldn’t seem to notice anything worthy of remembering to tell him. Or anyone.

  Elma said she’d stay with me, if I’d like, and at first I thought I would, but then I hoped I’d have a “moment” more with Frank and that it couldn’t happen if people were here. After Martha died, I had a strange visiting in the night that was likely a dream, but it put my mind at ease as she came before me and told me not to worry over her, that she was fine and that we’d meet again one day. I think the Lord just gave me that dream to console, and I didn’t want to miss the chance that I might have that same comfort with my Frank. Elma insisted, and I let her, grateful family didn’t think of me as a burden.

  We were just weeks away from Lilac Days, but I had no interest. Fritz said we should sell the cows, and I bawled like a baby when we did. They were Frank’s pets, and he’d raised a good herd of Holsteins. Fritz was able to get a single buyer, and that was good; the herd didn’t have to be broken up. “Pa would be happy. He really was going to sell them anyway. Someday.”

  “We saved him from the pain of it, I guess.” I wiped my eyes when the buyer came in a truck to pick them up. They were going to Tillamook. Frank wouldn’t like that, what with all his years as secretary for the creamery cooperative and Woodland’s being in competition with Tillamook. But the price was good, and they’d have good homes there. Frank would like knowing we got a fair price.

  One morning a month or so after Frank’s death, I rose early and dressed and began digging up lilacs. I thought of it in the night, during those hours when I’d wake in the dark and know that something was amiss. I’d turn to find Frank but seize only sorrow instead. What was the use of continuing on with Frank not here to share it? I had hours of regret, wishing I’d spent them with him instead of with my nose and magnifying glass staring at a pistil to see if it had been pollinated by a bee yet or if I could do it myself. Frank never complained about my time in the garden. I knew I couldn’t have done all I’d done without him. So I began ripping up plants. I shoveled and dug and dumped them in the wheelbarrow, sweat dripping from my forehead, forcing away tears. My shoulders ached as I moved to the next row, the cooing of doves in the magnolia and monkey puzzle tree serenading my destruction. Frenzied would be the word that Martha would use. I was frenzied.

  “What are you doing? Mama, stop it!”

  Fritz stood beside me. The sun was just coming up, and he wore his striped pajamas, bare feet in this May morning cool. “Stop it, Mama. Pa wouldn’t want this.”

  “I can’t have them. I don’t deserve them.”

  “Yes, you do. Pa was so proud of you, illuminating all his friends about your good work. Why we’d sit around in the barn with our beers, and he’d tell Solomon and Emil and Carl and all the uncles and friends what a genius you are and how he fully expected one day you’d concoct a totally new plant, not just a new variety, like Luther Burbank did.”

  “I never wanted to do that,” I said.

  “He knew what you wanted, and he admired you for it. He was a smart man, Mama, you know that. He respected you. He understood the need for a mind and body to be engaged in complicated work. What could you possibly say to him when you meet him again that would explain what you’ve just done? It would kill him to see this.”

  “Do you know what you just said?”

  “What?”

  “That it would kill him. He’s gone, Fritz. He’s dead. And maybe I did already kill him, making him work those cows until he was an old man, having him dig up lilacs to float during floods, replanting, digging, digging, digging, planting, planting, planting.” I held my head with my hands.

  “Being busy kept him alive, Mama. Dr. Hoffman said it was his heart. Could have happened anytime. He loved the cows, you love the lilacs, and you both loved each other.”

  I heard what my son said, that my husband admired my work, respected me.

  “He wanted you to do what mattered to you, and he knew you wanted lilacs with ‘bigger blooms, hardier stalks, richer color, and finer fragrance.’ He could quote you in that and often did.” Fritz had taken my shovel and held it. “You can’t destroy what you’ve done, what the two of you did together. You can’t.”

  My shoulders sank. It would be a cloudless day, blue sky over the lilacs. He took me back inside and poured me tea. “You warm up. I’ll get dressed, and then we’ll go back out there and plant those lilacs. Again.”

  Spent, I nodded. But I was grateful too. I’d felt my chest ache as I dug up those plants, worse than when I’d dug the grave for all those Bobby dogs or our many cats. Frank would want me to go on with the lilacs. Fritz was right about that. I wasn’t sure I had the energy to do it.

  But what else could I do? I didn’t want to become a busybody to my children or their children. I didn’t want to simply sit here and sink away into self-pity. I could only quilt so much before my eyes needed a rest, and I could only can and give away so much produce. And while I spent many vigorous hours dreaming of buying bulbs and seeds and starts from catalogs, I didn’t have Fort Knox as my financial backer, so I’d have to be frugal from now on. No milk or cheese money coming in. Once I’d used up the sale of the cows, I’d have to rely on the small catalog sales of my starts and the generosity of visitors. Our latest Bobby came trotting in and curled at my feet. “We’re going to keep the garden going. Fritz says we should.” The dog’s tail wagged. “And Frank would want it too, I submit.”

  I watched a hummingbird flutter near the columbine lining the shady path. Those flowers spoke of faith and fidelity, and now, Frank. Oh, how I missed that man, especially his loving touch to my face just before he kissed me. But he would want me to go on,
touching others in my way.

  After we replanted the shrubs I’d pulled out, I told Fritz he’d have to drive me to the schoolhouse.

  “What for?”

  “I’m going to see if there aren’t some young girls who might like to live in town in exchange for doing garden work.”

  And so I did, having high-school girls to nurture for the next many years, each one a reminder that Frank would have wanted me to keep going.

  Delia and Edmond surprised us all by telling us they expected a baby in 1924. Delia was forty-one when Fred Wilke was born, a full fourteen years after Clara. Like all the other grandchildren, Fred was born in this house too.

  “Oh, Mama, I’ve forgotten how to do things! I can’t even remember how to fold the diapers.”

  “Fold them different for boys than girls, anyway,” I told her and showed her how to put more cloth in the front.

  “I wish Papa was here to meet him,” she said, holding Fred in her arms.

  “I do too.” Not an occasion passed that I didn’t remember Frank and how he would have loved it.

  In 1927, the American Magazine wrote a one-page article about my garden. It was written by someone other than Cornelia, but she’d apparently been the impetus for this writer’s visit. He said he’d read a haiku dedication to me in Cornelia Givens’ book on arboretums. “She gave enough information to whet my appetite,” he said when he called asking if he could interview me and see the garden. Interview me. We’d have a conversation while we walked the paths; that’s all we’d really do, but I was secretly pleased for the attention. I’d seen Cornelia’s kind words to me in her Arboretums book but didn’t think anyone else would notice. I didn’t know the dedication poem was named haiku either.

  The magazine article came out in July, so it missed being a buildup for Lilac Days, but Frank would have liked it. I told the writer that Frank was my greatest supporter. And he was.

  The following year there were two articles: one in Better Homes and Gardens and yet another on May 2, 1928, in the Lewis River News. The latter article appeared just in time for my Lilac Days and helped promote Planter’s Day, following in June. They were covering the news, and we had made it!

  In the afternoon, a count showed four hundred cars parked at Hulda Klager’s Lilac Garden in one hour, the road being lined for a quarter of a mile. It is estimated that at least twenty-five hundred people were there for the day, coming from points all the way from Seattle. In addition there were several hundred cars during the week to avoid the rush.

  I chuckled with the last line. “Maybe they avoided the rush,” I told Marjorie, one of my high-school girls, “but we sure didn’t.” I read the newspaper with our electric lights, something we’d added this past year. I thought about lighting up the garden at night, the way the exposition did in Portland all those years before, but it wasn’t cheap, and besides, it kept the stars from glittering overhead. One should never mess with a view of the heavens.

  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.

  FORTY

  RUTH

  1933

  Ruth 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.”