Perdita Buchan's Blog: Random Notes
January 3, 2022
Sea Monkeys
Do you remember those ads in the back of comic books for sea monkeys - just add water and they will come alive, complete with crowns and tridents in the accompanying illustration. When summer comes to the Jersey shore, so do the sea monkeys - hordes of people who seem to have been reconstituted by the adding of summer. No crowns or tridents though - just huge rubber wheeled carts packed with all the clobber needed for a day at the beach.
July 26, 2021
Random Notes
Random might be my favorite words and Random Harvest might be the all time best title, though I have never read the book. It's a word that makes me think of running through an unknown field, throwing something up in the air to see where it will fall, a leaf blown by the wind, the pattern of clouds. Random was the inn you found on a back road before GPS and Trip Advisor, the book you found thumbing through a library card index file, the joy when your favorite song came on the car radio before there were playlists. Random was taking a chance, and chance is out of fashion - a country, a restaurant, a pair of boots, reviews of all of them are at. your finger tips. Random might once have been falling in love with someone you met on a train, not someone whose interests matched yours on OK Cupid. So it's random for this blog.
LILACS
Lilacs are at the heart of New England. Whenever I thought of the literary and intellectual period known as the flowering of New England, I thought of lilacs. But then I was living in Concord, the town at the heart of that renaissance. There Louisa May Alcott wrote Under The Lilacs, lilac bushes sprawled behind the Old Manse where Nathaniel Hawthorne lived and wrote. Even Thoreau, dweller in woods not gardens, described lilacs he found growing in the Concord woods on plots once deeded to freed slaves “a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone”.
Lilac hedges fronted the grand houses on Main St, but they also clustered around the more modest dwellings across the railroad tracks. They lasted about two weeks from bud to fading. Since their scent was strongest in the evening, at dusk in mid May I would ride my bike around town, where, in the words of Thoreau “The lilac…scented everywhere.”
Concord boasted many kinds of lilac from the everyday single flowered, purple and white, through double flowered pale pink to the deepest purple of the French hybrids that I cherished for their late flowering that extended the season. Each spring I used to wish that I could just travel north following the blooming of the lilacs. In Vermont, my daughter, born in June, was born in the time of lilacs. They grew abundantly around the little schoolhouse we rented, in the woods near old cellar holes and among the stones of forgotten family cemeteries.
Throughout New England, lilacs were planted outside town halls, courthouses and libraries, municipal planting that predated knock out roses and stella d’oro day lilies. Lilacs traveled west with New England settlers who could bring little else of home. Lilacs meant memories: sun on the sea, the dooryards of clapboard houses, church yards in little towns.
But lilacs are not native to New England or, indeed, America. They are as much foreigners as the settlers who first brought them here, twice displaced from Eastern to Western Europe and thence to the new world.
Like many immigrants, lilacs have adapted so well that their home and history has been forgotten. Not till I traveled down the Dalmatian coast, did I appreciate their origins. We were traveling by VW bug, an anomaly in places where horse drawn carts were the norm, and we regularly drew a crowd whenever we stopped. That morning, it was a little village near the coast. As we got out of the car, a flat horse drawn wagon piled with loaves of fresh bread jogged past and the yeasty smell mingled with another strong, familiar scent: lilacs. They were blooming everywhere because this was their home.
Lilacs grew there when the Greeks spread into the Balkan peninsula and gave the genus its name – syringa from the nymph Syrinx, who, pursued by the god Pan changed herself into a lilac bush. Pan then made his pipes from her branches. Lilacs saw the invading Roman legions, the Ottoman Turks with their hotblooded horses and slow-footed camels, the migrations of the Romani. Eventually, travelers took them to Europe, where they brightened the gray mill towns that bred New England’s Puritan settlers.
It seems almost a paradox that a plant with so romantic and colorful a history could come to represent a place bounded not by the gentle, blue Adriatic but the wilder, darker Atlantic, inhabited not by conquering cavalcades and exotic travelers, but by a stern, rooted, plain spoken people. But so it has ever been with immigrants. Their loss has always been America’s gain.
LILACS
Lilacs are at the heart of New England. Whenever I thought of the literary and intellectual period known as the flowering of New England, I thought of lilacs. But then I was living in Concord, the town at the heart of that renaissance. There Louisa May Alcott wrote Under The Lilacs, lilac bushes sprawled behind the Old Manse where Nathaniel Hawthorne lived and wrote. Even Thoreau, dweller in woods not gardens, described lilacs he found growing in the Concord woods on plots once deeded to freed slaves “a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone”.
Lilac hedges fronted the grand houses on Main St, but they also clustered around the more modest dwellings across the railroad tracks. They lasted about two weeks from bud to fading. Since their scent was strongest in the evening, at dusk in mid May I would ride my bike around town, where, in the words of Thoreau “The lilac…scented everywhere.”
Concord boasted many kinds of lilac from the everyday single flowered, purple and white, through double flowered pale pink to the deepest purple of the French hybrids that I cherished for their late flowering that extended the season. Each spring I used to wish that I could just travel north following the blooming of the lilacs. In Vermont, my daughter, born in June, was born in the time of lilacs. They grew abundantly around the little schoolhouse we rented, in the woods near old cellar holes and among the stones of forgotten family cemeteries.
Throughout New England, lilacs were planted outside town halls, courthouses and libraries, municipal planting that predated knock out roses and stella d’oro day lilies. Lilacs traveled west with New England settlers who could bring little else of home. Lilacs meant memories: sun on the sea, the dooryards of clapboard houses, church yards in little towns.
But lilacs are not native to New England or, indeed, America. They are as much foreigners as the settlers who first brought them here, twice displaced from Eastern to Western Europe and thence to the new world.
Like many immigrants, lilacs have adapted so well that their home and history has been forgotten. Not till I traveled down the Dalmatian coast, did I appreciate their origins. We were traveling by VW bug, an anomaly in places where horse drawn carts were the norm, and we regularly drew a crowd whenever we stopped. That morning, it was a little village near the coast. As we got out of the car, a flat horse drawn wagon piled with loaves of fresh bread jogged past and the yeasty smell mingled with another strong, familiar scent: lilacs. They were blooming everywhere because this was their home.
Lilacs grew there when the Greeks spread into the Balkan peninsula and gave the genus its name – syringa from the nymph Syrinx, who, pursued by the god Pan changed herself into a lilac bush. Pan then made his pipes from her branches. Lilacs saw the invading Roman legions, the Ottoman Turks with their hotblooded horses and slow-footed camels, the migrations of the Romani. Eventually, travelers took them to Europe, where they brightened the gray mill towns that bred New England’s Puritan settlers.
It seems almost a paradox that a plant with so romantic and colorful a history could come to represent a place bounded not by the gentle, blue Adriatic but the wilder, darker Atlantic, inhabited not by conquering cavalcades and exotic travelers, but by a stern, rooted, plain spoken people. But so it has ever been with immigrants. Their loss has always been America’s gain.
