queen amygdala

I bought something like a bushel basket of lilacs last week.  Lilacs are on my radar, people talk about them, Martha Stewart has opinions of them and whole issues of her magazine devoted to their cultivars, and I just bob along, Oh, my grandmother's house had an enormous lilac shrub in the yard.  Kind of seasonal for me to grow, but nice.  Purply! 

I was alone at the market last week and stuck my face inside a bouquet of them and the smell unfortunately & immediately transported me to a vale of memories exactly like a minefield.  For the last decade, the only people related to me by blood that I see are the people who grew inside of me and god, I have lost so much.  I am trying to work through it all, so I filled the house with lilacs.  I do not know how it will work out.  Maybe I will just go insane.

My son has been up to his usual hijinks -- plumbing, plaster, floods.  The kind of careless and clueless destruction that means I can only go on through our days by treating him like the stoner roommate with the psychotic girlfriend who has also stiffed me on the gas bill for the last three months.  I will help you out in a jam, man, but day to day?  We are not pals.  I know this dynamic well, having watched it play out over years as a girl in the tiny and neighboring-to-mine home of a taciturn molecular biologist who loved the smell of Guerlain's Shalimar and ran six miles every day, no matter the windchill.  It occurs to me that I do not know how that all ended -- the roommate relationship seeded in kindergarten, the deranged girlfriend, the habituation, the sense-memory most readily accessed upon exposure to fin de siècle perfume -- but I do know that Facebook is not our vehicle for answers.  Or could it be?