Lilac Time

I've been meaning to write about President Trump, the Pope, and tariffs but the April showers have brought May flowers, and my brother Robert DeStefano has sent me another of his nature poems. Last week his Dandelion poem was well received, and so here is his Ode to the fragrant Lilac with an explanation appended. *                                                     

Syringa vulgaris

Lilac

who 

endowed you with

such beauty

who

perfumed your flowers

made you a

delight

for the eye

Lilac

Syringa vulgaris

vulgaris?

I

cannot imagine Spring without the

Lilac

May

would never be

May

without the

Lilac

Syringa

nimble nymph

of the forest

pursued by

Pan

loved by this

man

 

           

At the beginning of May, I begin to look for Lilac flower buds on my Lilac bushes.  I know I will soon be treated with the distinct lilac fragrance.  I am attracted to those deep purple flowers like a bee searching for nectar.  There are so many different fragrant chemicals produced by plants.  One of the Lilac’s chemicals is a hydrocarbon known as beta-ocimene which belongs to a class of chemicals known as acyclic terpenes. The sweet smell of citronella, eucalyptus, and many other flowers is due to beta-ocimene.  This molecule in the presence of other molecules produces a distinct fragrance.

  

            Syringa is the genus name of the Lilac.  In Greek mythology, Pan, the god of fields and forests, fell in love with the nymph, Syringa.  She ran from him and eventually turned herself into a Lilac bush.  Pan stopped by the bush and made the first panpipe from the wood of the Lilac.

  

            The Lilac appears in Walt Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”   Here the Lilac represents a symbol of life after the death of President Abraham Lincoln.

            I experimented with making shampoo using water from the deep well at my little log cabin in the Berkshires. I first began by giving a bottle of my water, EAU, to some of my AP Biology students at the end of the year. I told them the wine bottle filled with water was magical so they should only drink it on a special occasion.  After 15 years, some of those students still have the unopened bottle in a refrigerator.  I then decided to use the water to make shampoo.  I purchased various essential oils from a commune cult located in New Mexico. The cult members gather thousands of flowers and extract oils from them.  A few drops in a liter of water are all that is necessary to make water fragrant.  I used Dr. Bonner's sulfur-free, unscented castile soap and a pinch of Himalayan sea salt to provide the minerals needed to make a lather.  I called the soap EAU-POO.  I persuaded one of my students, a beautiful girl with beautiful blond hair, to try the EAU-POO.  When she came to class the next day, she explained that she used the EAU-POO and twirled her beautiful hair. She laughed and said, “EAU-POO, look what it can do for you.”

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*Robert DeStefano's nature poems and other writings can be found on Amazon.