A whiff of lilacs takes me back to a corner of a thumbprint-sized, somewhat dangerous patch of lawn, “dangerous” due to pricklies, burrs and brambles that seemingly popped up in different spots every year. In that corner was an enormous lilac bush wedged between the tumble-down garage and Mr. Schmidt’s white picket fence. Mr Schmidt had lived next door for years before we moved in, and he’d enhanced his lawns, front and back, to perfect carpets of country club green. Our “lawns” embarrassed 6-year-old me deeply, covered as they were with weeds, crabgrass and brown patches, but there was no money to fix the damage we’d inherited, and no amount of pleading to the landlord got him to fix it, either. How two such disparate incomes lived next door to each other is an inequity I’ve never understood, to be honest.
For all that, we had the lilac bush and Mr Schmidt did not. Underneath the bush was a small patch of ground where I’d take cover with a book during springs and summers. When red-tinged envelopes arrived in the post that meant the gas or electricity was about to be shut off, again, I’d just go lay there, taking in the scent of blooming flowers and dreaming of my own vast estate and acres of gardens, with not a bramble, a cockle-bur or a bill to be seen.
Am I wrong today for looking out my window across the road to the park and wishing it were all mine?
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