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

water carrying things in. Lizzie’s piano had to wait.
    I thought all the rain on moving day was a bad omen, but Martha, our studious one, said the ancient Greeks wished for foul weather on an important day so that the gods wouldn’t notice mortals being hopeful and happy. “It’s why people do silly things to couples on wedding days,” she advised me.
    “Oh, is it?”
    “Yes, because the gods don’t want mortals to be happy on their own; they might come to believe they don’t need the intervention of Zeus or Aphrodite. They’ll get too proud and independent, suffer from hubris.” She looked solemn.
    “Hubris.”
    “It means prideful, Mama.”
    “Lucky for us, then, that we don’t believe in those kinds of gods,” I told her. I held the umbrella over her head as she stepped inside our new home carrying an armful of her many books to the second floor.
    Water pooled on the flat areas around the house, but we’d raised it the right amount. There’d be muck and mud in the yard and a darker canvas than I’d imagined.
    The sounds that came from outside that first night—the wind in the apple trees, rain pattering on the roof—and the sounds of Bobby, allowed inside, rolling on the carpet instead of a wood floor, were all new. I’d need to integrate them with sounds from memory, of when we’d helped Papa build the house or been there for Mama when he’d died. Frank turned over in our double bed and laid his arm across my belly. “Does it feel like home yet?” he asked.
    I was glad the room was dark and no full moon shone through the glass transom above the door.
    “Not yet,” I told him. “But it was the right thing to do, I know that. I think the soil is better here, and we’re higher.”
    “Can you find peace in this place?”
    I patted his hand. “I think I’ll go back and take a look at the old garden tomorrow. Say good-bye to what I’ve left there before I really dig in to this soil.”
    “All the important things you brought with you.”
    “I know, I know. And the Lord knows my lot. He makes my boundaries fall on pleasant places.” I paraphrased the psalm. “But leaving is … difficult. I put roots into that soil, Frank, deep roots. And it’s like I’ve left a limb behind, but I can still feel it with me.”
    “Don’t know anything except you that might make me feel that way.”
    “I appreciate that, Frank.”
    He put his arms around my shoulders, tugged me to him. I hoped he wouldn’t feel the wetness on my face. “You’ll be my wife and mother our children here in this big new house. Make it your own place doing what a woman needs to do.”
    “Yes. That’s what I’ll do.”
    That’s when the melancholy began.

T WELVE

L IKE W ATER
Hulda, 1903
    M elancholy seeped in like water filling footprints on a soggy lawn. It was always there beneath the surface that year but didn’t assert itself until pressure was applied.
    The children slept in two rooms upstairs, Fritz having his own, the younger girls sharing a bed, with Lizzie sleeping on a small cot in the same room. Frank and I occupied the large south bedroom. From my bed, I could look out onto the yard, a yard that needed a lot of work. The kitchen was bigger, and the dining and living room settled around the six of us just fine, giving us room to play Parcheesi at the round table that had been my mother’s. The china hutch held favorite things like my grandmother’s silver tea service and a valentine from each of her grandchildren and the Haviland china with the green cloverleaf pattern daintily painted around the edges. I was prepared to feel comforted by the memories that surrounded me in our new home.
    “Expect a little nostalgia,” my sister Bertha told me as she dusted the hutch after I mentioned feeling sad.
    Maybe the sadness began with thinking of my parents too much. They were everywhere in that house, memories like cobwebs catching me unsuspecting. The flood didn’t help my mood either. It wasn’t as bad as