When I moved to my farm upstate, my wife then did not come, and did not wish to come. We began to move apart, she drawn into her work as a journalist in New York, me falling deeper and deeper into my life on a farm with animals, and the chance to write about them day and night. I knew I could never go back. I came to know she could never come with me.

I did not see until it was too late what the move really said about my life and long marriage. I took care of the farm, she visited once every month or so and we both told ourselves and I told the world that this is what a good marriage is, a marriage where people are free to live and work apart and love one another so much it doesn’t matter.

There is one thing we did together, we planted lilac bushes, the traditional bush of the family she farm, the bushes memorialized by the great poet Walt Whitman when President Lincoln was assassinated. It was something we did together in the waning days of our marriage together, it gave me hope that our marriage was not lost.

That was not what was to be, but I appreciate lilacs and love to see them bloom as beautifully as ours. Thank you, Paula, for that. This is in memory of our plantings.

__

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d.

 And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

 I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

 Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

 Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.”

– Walt Whitman, first verse.