At a Westben choral concert recently a friend and I were reduced to soggy tears when Aemilia Moser and Dante Santone performed the sweet love song We'll Gather Lilacs in the Spring, written in the 1940s by Ivor Novello. It's a sentimental WWII song; lovers, the fellow off to war, sing of their hopes and dreams of a peaceful 'after' with its gentle pleasures. Love, loss and longing.
"We'll gather lilacs in the spring again/And walk together down a shady lane/Until our hearts have learned to sing again/When you come home once more."
Recently The Gentle Author, a daily staple on my morning reading list, visited the bluebells in Bow Cemetery. So I am being given a nudge to think about English bluebells.
There's something about spring bloom - that longed-for loveliness, joy at the renewal of colour and beauty at the end of dark dormant winter. But it's a fleeting joy. Spring blossoms are delicate; their season is short. As with our glorious autumn foliage which blazes for such a short time, fresh spring flowering evokes for me a wistfulness and a kind of sadness.
I believe English bluebells also bloom in Ontario, but the spring beauties that stop my homie's heart are trout lilies, violets, jack in the pulpit and trilliums, the blooms that adults pointed out to me as a child who loved flowers. I remember having the mysterious jack revealed to me for the first time, on an Arbor Day school outing with Miss Eaton, a whole lifetime ago. From that day also, I carry with me the lifetime prohibition against picking a trillium.
For me, bluebells will always evoke happy times, delighted springtime discoveries along delightful English pathways with dear ones who are no longer among us.
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