Where Lilacs Still Bloom by Jane Kirkpatrick Read Free Book Online Page A

help. But that don’t free that mind to find a path that take it to good things, higher things. You not getting her schoolin’, that same as neglecting a tree and letting it die for lack of watering.”
    “Well, what do you suggest?” The man stood, scissors in hand. Nelia hovered beside Jasmine, her shoulders pressed into the woman’s fleshy side.
    “Maybe see if they’s a place she could board in town. Stay there and go to school ’stead of boarding with the Runyans way up the Lewis River.” Mr. Lawson had moved them to a faraway logging outpost with a single boarding house, while he stayed in Woodland, sleeping in the back of his shop. He rarely saw his daughter. Jasmine supposed this was as safe a place for her as could be with Mrs. Runyan being the only white woman around, the rest being Indians and loggers who weren’t all that talkative, but not hurtful either. But the time had come for change.
    “She start cutting up other people’s things, and we have to move anyway, then what?”
    “All right, all right!” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
    Jasmine and the girl began the long walk back home, smelling the sweet scent of lilacs coming from the west. “Isure like them smells,” Jasmine said. “Can you smell them, child?”
    Nelia shrugged. She took the woman’s hand and clung to it. “Yes, child, you just hang on to me. I be your tree till your daddy find someone to help you get you some roots of your own.”
    He needed to do that fast. Jasmine didn’t think she was long for this world with age and ailments ready to settle on her wide shoulders.
    “Let’s take a walk toward that lilac smell, child. See what else might grow in that garden. Maybe we take that heavy cloak of sadness you wearing and lay it flat, plan a picnic on it with lilacs blooming all around us. You like that, child?”
    The girl nodded as Jasmine stroked her hair. The past held Mr. Lawson hostage, but Nelia still had a chance to heal.

E LEVEN

T HE C HANGE
Hulda, 1903
    I didn’t relish all the adjustments necessary to turn a new landscape into the comforts of home, but my parents’ yard was a canvas I could paint with flowers. I set rows of lilac starts to add to theirs as soon as I knew we were moving. A ginkgo tree already flourished there, planted years ago. I pictured an umbrella tree and magnolias to grace the property. I tried not to think about this having been my parents’ house. I tried not to think about the fact that my girls were going to be married at the Presbyterian church and celebrate in this yard and how much I’d miss them afterward. I’d have my birthday in May, and I would be old. I tried not to think of turning forty.
    We packed with the goal of moving in April. On Saturday, moving day, all the relatives and neighbors planned to load furniture and whatnot onto wagons and transport trunksand farm equipment the few miles from the Bottoms to the house on Pekin Road.
    It rained the week of our move, cool, shivery rains that didn’t mist like some springs but pelted down with the wind, pushing wet through wool. We watched the Columbia and Lewis, and when the water hit a certain spot on the banks, we started moving cows to higher ground. Most of the farmsteads flooded, and all the farmers had to wait until the water receded before beginning to plant. We had to.
    When the water disappeared, life along the river settled down. The air was thick with the scent of newly turned earth and the flutter of pink and white from apple and cherry blossoms that farmers and house Fraus would plant. The high water never lasted all that long, but there’d been major floods in the late eighteen hundreds that ravaged a few weeks. Floods could make a misery of a garden, not to mention be deadly to people and cattle. Rain, which is our constant companion in the Northwest winters, fell as hard and steady as usual on moving day. All our goods were loaded, so we drove them to the new house where we sloshed through foot-deep