Olivia Schneider pulled down her mask and inhaled the perfume from purple blossoms, their sweetness casting the engineer back to her Wisconsin kick-the-can childhood and her mother clipping lilacs for the dinner table.
Last spring, the simple act would’ve flouted signs imposing pandemic rules for the Harvard-owned Arnold Arboretum’s more than 400 lilac bushes. “Please enjoy the lilacs from a distance,” they read, warning that they should be treated “like any other surface that can spread Covid-19.”
— Read more in A Sign of Post-Pandemic Spring: Sniffing Mother’s Day Lilacs at Bloomberg.
Thanks for posting this, Robin; I didn’t know about Arnold Arboretum and Lilac Sunday. Perhaps a visit there will go onto my bucket list!
I’m not sure I could have borne it all last year — my sister’s health problems, the pandemic, the fate of the world — if I hadn’t been able to go out and sniff flowers, especially lilacs. These were flowers in my own yard and neighborhood, not in a formal garden or public place, so there were no restrictions. My daily worry-walk last spring included burying my nose in something fragrant as often as possible. I’m so grateful to plants and pollinators and Nature for reminding me that life could and would go on.
Same…we did more walking outside in 2020, in gardens and nature preserves, than we’ve ever managed before, and I’m sure it made the year much better than it would have been otherwise.
I am surrounding now by blossoming lilac shrubs and wisteria; it is a joy to have the scent around me. But I do confess I do bend close to sniff them- but this is through a mask!
Oh, wisteria! Every spring I regret not planting wisteria.
The lilacs on the side of my condo are in bloom right now and I too sniff them as often as possible; I think I am the only one around here who bothers to even notice they are there so I think I am safe from any unpleasantness. *knocks on wood*
Fingers crossed here too!
I read about Lilac Sunday in a blog review of En Passant, unfortunately can’t remember by whom. It seems really sad that lilacs were supposed to be avoided, especially now that we know that COVID can’t easily be spread by surfaces.
How cool, I had never heard of it!