Johnson County Library is pleased to announce that Abigail Knutson has won our writing contest on the theme Color Our World with her piece "Lilac Season."
Abigail Knutson loves warm sourdough and black coffee and can usually be found reading, writing, homeschooling, and geeking out over Austen, Lewis, and Tolstoy. She writes on Substack at Literary Feast.
Lilac Season
My cousins and sisters and I wore small paths
through the lilac bush like mice.
We played until the center
hollowed out a room.
It was as large as a tree, as large as a house,
a fortress of green leaves and flickering sunlight
which once held our mother and her siblings.
We played in the shadow
of their childhood—stories and songs
ghosted harmony with ours across the decades.
The lilac bush kept company with the little house,
a summer kitchen for ovens to swelter
apart from the shaded, blue farmhouse.
Long ago a farmer’s wife needed that little house
to survive her summer heat,
and she planted a lilac bush outside her window
for its purple scent to grace her work.
She likely knew how to kill and clean
the animals that she fed her family.
My cousins and sisters and I knew nothing of her lot,
of the Sisyphean effort of existence,
and we played in the lilac bush
as though she had planted it just for us to find.
The lilac bush must have grown in my memory.
It was our home base, and our imaginations
knew no bounds.
We took rides out west on an orphan train,
packed snacks for the journey all the way to the creek,
hiked the crabapple orchard on a hill,
and snuck on secret missions through the pine forest
where our footsteps slalomed on the carpet of pine needs
and the air hung richly spiced and silent.
Returning to rest in our lilac bush
where heat filtered through a screen of leaves,
we breathed in the sweet perfume.
For me, the lilacs bloom year-round,
their faces nodding above ours.
Our grandma loved her lilacs,
but she loved us more.
I can still smell them, richly purple and sweet,
so sweet you keep pressing your face
into the blossoms, soft against your skin,
risking the bees to breathe in the scent.
When I smell lilacs in my yard today,
my grandparents are with me still.
A love like that doesn’t leave you.
