Lilas en la ventana, c. 1880
Fuente: https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/
Every time I step out onto my terrace, I get drunk.
I can’t help it, but I’m not alone.
In June, the entire city is under the influence of this blissful state of intoxication.
It’s the product of a very fine distillation that takes a whole year to uncover its freshness.
It’s lilac season.
This shrub of pale purple flowers (lilac), with its sublime luminous halo, takes over Calgary, where the famous Lilac Festival is held every year.
For an entire weekend, streets and avenues in the city center are closed so people can listen to music, enjoy local art vendors, and quietly soak up the scent of lilacs in this kind of visual and olfactory celebration.
You can see people walking with their eyes closed, inhaling deeply and then exhaling with a smile.
A kind of collective happiness.
I only have to look out into my garden, where miraculously, after seeing them almost dead in the winter, they return.
It’s not easy to describe the smell of lilacs, or flowers in general, in words. Perhaps the experts in Grasse, France, the world’s perfume capital, are the most knowledgeable. I don’t even try.
For me, it’s about inhaling, exhaling, and feeling their clear, crystalline poetry.
Intoxicating.
A true gift from these poets of nature.
And well, how could I not toast with a real glass of white wine, here next to my flowering bush?
There I stood, ecstatic, sipping life, humming an old melody.
Everything was going very well until I opened my eyes and met the stern gaze of my neighbor, watching me from her window.
“She knows me well,” I thought, as I invited her to join me.
She declined, of course, but I inevitably remembered the maxim (with all my respect to AA) “a known drunk is better than an anonymous alcoholic.”
Cheers and scent of lilacs!
Today she shares her “impulsive meditations” from Calgary, Canada, where she lives.
leonorcanada@gmail.com