Never Snub a Lilac
Courtesy will bring you both sweet rewards
Can a flower feel snubbed?
You bet your stamens and pistils it can!
Imagine yourself as one of nature’s most exquisite creations, with a scent so delicious it can make an industrious bumblebee too drunk to find its way home?
All through winter your enamored devotees wait for your first fragile buds. Poets sharpen their quills or eagerly clean their keyboards, ready to fill their writing notebooks or saved files with page after page of mind-altering metaphors and sensuous similes.
Horticulturists can’t stop themselves from messing with your chromosomes. Herbalists press your tender petals into bars of goat’s milk soap.
Gardeners gather your blossoms by the armful, arranging your stems in graceful bouquets, displayed in every room, including the bathroom, where your delicate fragrance makes every cloying air freshener candle hang its head in shame.
Snubbing a lilac is a discourtesy that for the most part hurts the snubber more than the “snubbee”. The lilac will survive the snub and go on blithely captivating more responsive souls. But the person who snubs a lilac loses the chance both to receive and to give something of great worth.
