170. Syringa

 

It’s January and a little cool, though we’re in the middle of a thaw and the snow is just left on the shaded hillsides and dirty piles on the sides of the road. Today it’s a cold rain while other days it’s a slushy snow or just gray. On occasion, like yesterday, there are moments of sunshine giving little hints of hope beyond the clouds. The grass is starting to green even, but I know it will get covered again by snow because it’s only January. It’s cabin fever season and there’s a good two months of it left, or even more since we’re in the middle of a pandemic.

This is when I long for the spring and for the heady scent of syringa in June. The state flower of Idaho grows in every disparate part of this state of varied landscapes from the desert hills in the south to the breaking meadows in the heavily forested north. While now its branches are barren, in late May through June it will be heavy with white blossoms, sometimes weighting its branches as even now when the snows are heavy. But those flowers will send you over the moon with their heavenly scent. They smell and look like orange blossoms which is also why it’s called mock orange.

On a day like today when it is all cloudy and raining steadily, darkness imposing itself over the light, I just like closing my eyes and imagining all the blue sky just beyond those clouds. In my meditations it becomes a balmy June day and I’m sitting on a rock beside a river surrounded by syringa bushes fully in bloom with their effervescent scent wafting on the air. When that occurs, I am able to find a little piece of contentment in this troubled land.

So now, in all of the crazy newsfeed time of “stolen elections” by people upset about some self-centered egomaniac who never should have been legitimized ever, I just give thanks for those things that are bigger and better, giving no thought to the pettiness of humanity. Even in this dark hour those things like the syringa still have a place, not only in my imagination but in the reality of time’s continuum.