The breeze is dancing with the curtains in my living room. They are replacements for the pair of curtains that hung there for years, not the same, but as close as I could find. I really loved those older curtains which, if I were truthful, were not window curtains at all, but rather fabric shower curtains purchased on sale from Pottery Barn. They fit perfectly over the three windows. They were an off-white and sewn as a series of open squares. Sunlight would shed their pattern on the floor, doubly spreading their charm. They were perfect. At least I thought so. But time diminishes perfect and after several weak spots appeared that couldn’t be repaired, they went the way of that which is much-loved, but old and falling apart.
The new curtains are linen, a soft, white linen with their own attractive texture. Because there are three windows, a pair of traditional curtains didn’t fit. I bought one extra panel and added it to the center window. The breeze flows beautifully through three panels and more than makes up for the lack of shadow play.
They prod my memory to the sheers that graced our windows in Brooklyn. My mother loved those sheers. They were among the few items in our living room that were not recycled from something else. They were a focus of her housekeeping, hand washed four times a year and then hung in our hallway with some rather evil-looking pin stretchers holding them fast and straight as they dried.
In Brooklyn during that era you had to wash your curtains often. Everyone heated with coal and the dust that coal heat produced filtered through the walls onto the window sills and into the curtains. Still, Mom would, when the weather was right, open the windows to appreciate the gentle statement of a breeze in her curtains. It was an elegance in a less-than-elegant room.
That little space in the middle of the front bay would hold the largesse from her garden. Colors and scents from each season. In the spring it would be lilies of the valley.
And that thought brings me to the door of our cottage on the lake, with a breeze that will be bringing that marvelous scent of lilies of the valley. They will fill the cottage with their perfume as I work through the dusty process of awakening summer. I know that I will stop work and go outside to stand on the deck and take in the effortless beauty of the gentle slope that is filled with the lilies. No one planted them, they simply were there one spring morning many years ago. And every year I am transformed by their scent, the softness of it and how lovely it is to have this gift in our life. Are they oracles of something to which I should attend?
Something as simple as a breeze and its synergy with the scent of lilies of the valley brings not only spring to mind, but times as a young woman long ago, dressed as women would be in those days, when she wore Muguet des bois and dreamed of a life filled with flowers and soft romantic scents.
My grandmother gave me my first bottle of Muguet des bois.
“If we wanted a scent, we carried flowers, but this, and she would sniff the bottle, this is better.” Both my mother and grandmother loved lilies of the valley and carefully curated their planting and spread. In the spring, the back yard, even among the smokestacks of Brooklyn, was heavenly with their perfume.
And I got to thinking about how in this world of gigantic homes and television sets and mind-numbing video games, something as simple as a breeze through curtains and the memory of an old perfume can bring a contented smile and a the awareness of the awful beauty of the ordinary.
Like so many experiences, these simple things … the breeze in the curtains, the scent of lilies of the valley … were always there but my attention, my appreciation was elsewhere, owned by all of the small and large aspirations that living today require.
I wonder, how else I can re-see the world around me to capture the riches that lay undiscovered, the essence of the beauty of the unrecognized, the ordinary?
