Grandmaw's Lilac Bush

My great-grandmaw Mary was always a special person to me, and besides my parents, was probably the person who most influenced my life.

Yes, Grandmaw Mary was a remarkable woman. I remember stopping by her house when I was a little boy, she seemed to always have something good to eat and just the right amount of encouragement for a young boy. I remember she made the best sausage links in the whole world, I don't know what she did to them but I do believe I’d give my eyeteeth just to have a taste of one of them now. My grandmaw Mary would often tell me stories of her childhood and the things she did when she was my age.

My great-grandmaw Mary (Kile) Burns

My grandmaw Mary was also a healer of sorts, if you came to her with an illness or “war wound” as she called them, she could usually patch you up in no time flat. If you had poison ivy, she’d tell you to go hunt her up a big piece of milkweed, which she would administer with the best of care. If you had a burn that hurt, she would say a Bible verse over it to take the fire out of it. Also, if you had a really bad cut, she could stop the blood by saying a Bible verse over it too. She knew all the plants on the mountain and what cured what. Like I said, she was an amazing person.

I remember when grandmaw got up in years, she went to spend the winter with her daughter in Baltimore. Grandmaw never did like Baltimore but knew it was probably for the best, winters on the mountain were hard. But first thing every spring, everyone would gather at the old homeplace when grandmaw came back to the mountain. Grandmaw’s only stipulation to her children when they talked her into leaving for the winter was that she had to be back in time to see her lilacs bloom. You see, Grandmaw Mary loved her lilacs, she had a large lilac bush that had grown on the property ever since her and granddaddy Don built the house in the mid 1940’s.

Grandmaw Mary's Lilac Bush

She once told me that she was a lot like that lilac bush, she might not be in the best spot in the world, but every year she saw the spring of the year as a fresh new start…a time for new beginnings. She said the lilac was a special thing and its smell was the sweetest of any blossom, and that it thrived even in the harshest of conditions. I do believe Grandmaw Mary was the happiest when her lilac bush was blooming, she made frequent trips every day to the bush to smell the fragrant blossoms and to taste them. I remember how grandmaw showed me how to taste the sweet nectar of a lilac blossom, it was ever so subtle…even the essence of the lilac was better than honey.

Can you taste the nectar of Grandmaw's lilac bush?

In the early Spring of 1988, the family decided to have some dozer work done in order to put in a bathroom. However, to do this, Grandmaw’s lilac bush would have to go. Since there were other lilac bushes on the property, nobody thought to get a slip of it to start it somewhere else, so the bulldozer shoved the bush over the hill and covered it with rocks and dirt. Everyone was sad to see it go, but we needed a bathroom. A few weeks after the dozer work, word came from Baltimore that grandmaw had fallen on an icy sidewalk and had broken her hip, she would not be returning to the mountain that year. As with many elderly people, a broken hip was essentially a death sentence for grandmaw, she lingered for nearly another year before she passed away, but she never got to return to her home on the mountain. I remember at her funeral, as we went to the graveyard where grandmaw was laid to rest, out from her grave a lilac bush was blooming.

Two years after the dozer work and a year after grandmaw’s passing, I noticed a green sprout of something growing up out of the rocks and debris that was shoved out of the way in order to put in the septic system…it was a lilac bush…Grandmaw’s lilac bush! I was overjoyed to see that it was still alive. I told mom and dad what I had found and they too were happy and said I could move it to the center of our front yard if I could get a sprout of it. I did and transplanted Grandmaw’s lilac bush to a spot in our front yard, where it remains to this day.

Even today in the springtime, I love to visit mom and dad when the lilacs are blooming so I can smell the fragrant blossoms of grandmaw’s lilac bush and taste the lilac nectar. I swear sometimes I can feel Grandmaw standing right there beside me.

Summertime Swimming Hole

Summertime has always been a magical time for me, and has always been my favorite season. I like the heat and everything about the season. As the old song says “Summertime and the livin’ is easy.”

My reasons for loving summer are many, but all of them have roots in my childhood. I remember on the last day of school, it was always tradition in my family to go swimming in the river. In my earlier childhood, the whole gang of us loaded into the back of granddads truck and went to the swimming hole behind Teddy Bland’s place below Riverton.

After what seemed like an eternity where granddad stopped and talked to Teddy and let him know that we’d be down at the river, we finally made our way past Teddy's turkey houses, through the hayfields and on back to the river. I remember my granddad would always sing a little ditty that went "I'm goin' swimmin' with bow-legged women" to annoy us, but mostly we ignored his singing because we were so excited to get to the swimming hole.



Mind you this was in early June in the Potomac Highlands and the water wasn't exactly warm, although it certainly didn't matter to us, we'd have gone swimming even if ice chunks had been floating down the river. I remember my aunts and my brother would always ease into the water amid loud exclamations of "ooosh, that's cold", while me and a few of the others would just run right into the river and hit it all at once. Eventually we'd all be in the water and having a great time.

We had games that we’d invented for when we were swimming, like the old “warsh machine” as we called it, to do this you’d get in water about up to your chest and by linking your hands together and making a quick side by side motion, a great foam arose from the water, to us it looked exactly like the water in the old tub of the wringer washer that mom used.

Inevitably, someone would bring soap and shampoo and the older kids would wash their hair and wash up in the river, we didn’t have running water at home (unless you count running to the spring to get it) so it was easier to do this than to haul water up the hill from the spring to wash in. I remember for as far as you could see down the river, there’d be a long trail of soapsuds floating on top of the water.

As we’d eventually wear ourselves out from all the swimming, we’d get out of the water and dry off with towels we had brought with us, some of the girls would lay out on the rocks the dry off in the sun. We’d usually change into dry clothes, that way we could hold up the wet clothes from the truck bed or hang them out of the car window, and let the wind dry them on the way home.

I’m sure we looked like a bunch of gypsies with our wet clothes flapping in the breeze but we didn’t care, we had the whole summer ahead of us.