Where does the lilac grow?

This post is contributed by Coastal Rivers Trustee Barnaby Porter. Read the previous post here.

Editor’s note: This piece is from Barnaby’s archive.

Where does the lilac grow? Let’s see; it seems most anywhere, but that is not quite so. The truth is, lilacs have a past, a history and, more often than not, a story connected to where they are found. One might grow next to a summer porch, or just outside a kitchen door, or perhaps be lending its grace and shade to a garden or quiet cemetery. It could simply be hiding behind an old hen house. But then there’s the idle lilac, forgotten, next to an ancient stone foundation in an abandoned field, a place someone, sometime, saw fit to dignify with the lilac’s gentle green leaf and luscious bloom. That’s where the lilac grows.

It is the companion to human habitations. Wherever a lilac stands, it’s likely someone once cared for that spot, lived there probably, and took the trouble to dig a hole to plant the tender bush in the hope that in the years to follow, the scent of its full flower might waft through an open window.
It is witness, too, to generations as they come and go and will outlive us all with its pretty memories.

As an old man, Winnie Havener told me his story once, remembering his happiest days . . . when he fished lobsters in Muscongus Bay as a young man. “I was handsome them days, I was,” he told me, “and strong. I just had a row-dory. No motors back then . . . rowed all day long. Dug clams too and fished other things, but mostly it was the lobsters.” He lived on Black Island in those years. Pretty well out there, it’s a small island with no harbor, but it has a musical shingle beach and a second, steep sand beach where he pulled up his dory.

Winnie Havener

His wife stayed with him on the island. “Oh, how I loved that woman!” he told me, and told me more than once. “She was happy on the island . . . worked hard, kept the house, was a wonderful cook, didn’t matter what it was. She had a garden too. She liked it, the quiet and all . . . we’d set and watch the sunset from the beach.”

I imagined them rowing all the way into Friendship once a week to sell the lobsters Winnie caught and to buy groceries. “We didn’t need much. Did most everything for ourselves . . . She’s gone now . . . Been a long time. The little house is gone too. Nothin’ left, just the well.”

I went out to the island afterward and found the well, all caved in under the sagging boughs of a big spruce tree, and what was left of the house, a few boards and planks sticking up through the raspberries. A small stand of sumac had taken over the place, along with a nest of hornets, and trailing vines of beach peas did what they could to cover up the old man’s story.

But off to one side of where the house had stood, was a clump of lilacs. At one time, there must have been a lawn there, mowed by a young man’s scythe, where two people sat happy together, looking out to sea in the summer evenings.

Now everything is gone, the old man too, everything but that lilac bush. The last I knew, it was still there with its pretty memories.

Artist and author Barnaby Porter has had a varied career in marine research, aquaculture, and woodworking, among others. Most recently he partnered with his wife Susan as co-owners of the Maine Coast Book Shop & Cafe in downtown Damariscotta. Barnaby currently serves on Coastal Rivers’ Board of Trustees. For more about Barnaby, click here.