Emphasis Preaching Journal

I can't smell lilacs without thinking of myself as a schoolboy stepping from my parents' house and walking past the blooming lilacs. One smell and it's a spring morning and I'm young again, walking beyond the lawn and onto the street to catch the school bus. But more happens. I then think of the poem I was learning in high school: Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd," his poetic weeping for the death of Abraham Lincoln who was assassinated when the lilacs bloomed: April 14, 1865.