Bloom Where You’re Planted
/a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau
On April 7, 2020, I was alone in my house. We were all alone in our houses, except for those of us who were locked in with our family members. It was too early for “bubbles” and “pods”. I thought, perhaps we all thought, that this would all be over soon, and so, while I waited, I thought I would get to know my landscape a bit better. And since what is now my yard has been my family’s farm for over two centuries, there is much in it that has been there my whole life, and I never questioned it – never asked why the peonies were pushing up through the foundation of the old barn, why there were poppies in a bramble patch next to a culvert. I never asked these questions of my landscape until I became its steward, five years ago.
Bursting forth from the southeast corner of my house is an ancient, unruly run of old-school lilac bushes. Their blooms reached to my old bedroom window on the second floor, and in my youth, they were gathered by the armful, shoved into every pitcher and pot in my room, hauled to picnics at Maudslay with my friends and given by the fistful to my great-aunt Emily, who would exclaim over them as if we had just discovered a secret treasure, as if she had not been born next to the window that looked out on all of this beauty. Aunt Emily had an endless supply of delightedness with small, natural things brought to her by eager children. It never occurred to me that she was probably also, for her whole long life, remembering her mother.
Philip and Mary Dyer (Noyes) Poore, about 1905.
Mary Dyer Noyes, my great-grandmother, was born in Byfield in 1886. Her own mother died when she was six, and she was raised by her bachelor uncle, the much-loved George Washington Noyes. I do not know how she and Philip Poore met – the families are so intertwined it is likely that they had known each other their whole lives, but when she married my great-grandfather 1905, his pinched face was brightened and softened by her company. Philip was also a motherless child – his own mother died giving birth to him. Perhaps because of this shared loss or because of the steadfast, lifelong love of her uncle, Mary Dyer Noyes Poore was a tender wife and a joyful mother. She was also a fellow breadwinner on a farm that was barely able to feed her growing family, let alone turn a profit. These are the things I know about her from the memories of her six children. She worked all day and often all night, planting, weeding, harvesting, and canning vegetables, caring for six children, and doing all the washing, cooking, and cleaning of a busy, dusty farm. She was always laughing, and she gave her children tricycles and let them ride through the house, and they had an indoor see-saw. She cared more than anything about their education, and she caned chairs late into the night to make a few extra dollars that she could save for her children. And somehow, she read voraciously and was part of an old-fashioned reading club and helped to establish an Episcopal church with the Emery sisters, and even more extraordinarily, from where I’m sitting, she planted flowers.
The lilac at the corner of the Poore house, 1910s.
My great-grandmother died in 1934, just 47 years old. Though the cause of death was pneumonia, Aunt Emily told me that her mother “worked herself to death”. I can only imagine how exhausted she was, what a heavy burden her life must have seemed at times, and yet, she planted flowers. The run of lilacs appears in nearly every posed photograph of her young children in the 1910’s and 1920’s.
The six Poore children and cousin Evelyn Rogers in 1920 in front of the lilacs.
The poppies and peonies in the briar patch by the culvert? She planted those, and every spring, when the plate-size poppies unfurled their papery petals, it felt like a visitation to her children. I never met her, of course, and neither did my mother, and so her poppies remind me of Aunt Emily, the last person I knew who understood deeply what planting these flowers meant to her mother, how they reflected her belief that life and hope would always return.
In April 2020, as I explored my landscape, I was determined to rejuvenate the lilac bushes, a task that I did not complete. The original bushes are over twenty feet tall, woody and gnarled. Suckers spread from its base in waves. I started to dig up the suckers and cut them away as I had been told this would give more energy to the base plant, but with all the sadness and fear in the world, killing something with such a will to live was hard for me. And so, I put out the call. No-contact lilac pick-up, bring your own shovel. And they came, friends and friends of friends and strangers. One such visitor, a woman who grew up nearby on Chase Street, came by. My mom popped out to say hello, and mentioned that our visitor’s great-grandmother Mary, and my great-grandmother Mary, were best friends. "When they finally got telephones, they talked every day", she said. The two great-granddaughters of best friends from a century ago now share this lilac bush.
I love my town, and my house, and the benevolent whisper of the past when you least expect it. And as the lilac blooms fade for another year, I am reminded that hope, and memories, and love, can outlive you. Plant carefully.
1918 West Newbury directory listings for Mary Knowles and Mary D. Poore - a prolific lilac bush would lead their great-granddaughters to meet during the COVID19 pandemic.
