Things That Bloom, Things That Survive

Found this toward the end of the Field and Stream anthology my father had given me:

[describing the remains of a long-abandoned farmstead]

"Beside the doorstep was a lilac bush, almost as tall as the cottonwoods. He thought of the wife who had set it out, a little shrub then, and the husband who chided her for wasting time on such frivolous things with all the farm work to be done. But the work had come to nothing, and still the lilac bloomed each spring, the one thing that had survived."

-- Corby Ford, "Tinkhamtown."

Two things come to mind. First, the piece excellently captures the ongoing question of what matters. No one knows what the outcomes will be, and of course we have no idea if the farmer found his own value in his farm work, even if it eventually came to nothing.

The second thing that comes to mind has to do with the fact that my father gave me the book in his old age. When he was a young man he moved his family to the big city. We bought a house in what were then the new suburbs, and the tail end of an old windbreak comprised of tall, thin, Chinese Elms ran across the rear of our backyard. Under the largest of them a small lilac bush struggled to survive. Dad dug it up and moved it to the front of the house, where, the next spring, it bloomed, probably for the first time in many years, maybe ever. Dad always liked that bush, for that reason, and the last time I drove by the old home, years later, it still bloomed, outliving him. But I don't think he minded, and I like to think that, at the more spiritual level of things, the bush was grateful to him.

Thinking of that lilac reminds me of another bit of tiny history writ large. In an old farmfield near that same house I found an old farm wagon under a huge cottonwood, surrounded by tall grasses, smaller trees growing through its rusted wheels. That wagon always intrigued me -- I couldn't help thinking that once, years ago, the farmer or a farm hand unhitched the wagon at that spot, perhaps and probably intending to come back for it when it was needed, but it never moved again. A spot of history locked into place. The farmhouse gone, the barn nothing more than a stone foundation, but the wagon sat through the seasons, growing old but staying itself long after the rest of its world had worn away.

Odd what survives, and fascinating what stories they suggest.