Formosa lilies

Now, a few hours after this picture was taken, some have opened. Their perfume bears no resemblance to the overpowering, stifling scent I used to associate with lilies. The Scheherezade, true to its name, has a heavy, cloying scent like that. But these are so refined, so light, so delicious. It is something I hope wafts down from this fifth floor and to the street below.

Sometimes I walk through currents of scent in Brooklyn and the city - it happened a month before the Tilia trees bloomed, I could smell it occasionally at intersections, even though the flowers were still tight buds. I wax lyrical.

My mom told me today that an old family friend, who has leukemia, has asked to go home, and away from chemo. I am very sad. Marita was the first person to put the idea of garden design into my head, when Iwas a little girl. I walked into their dining room one day, it was dark and the wood of the table was dark, too, and cool. Spread on it were coloured sketches and reams of paper. What's that, I asked. A garden design, she said. And I knew that was what I wanted to do. It just took me a while...

Somehow the lilies, perhaps because of their associations, are very poignant to me. Their beauty is so undeniable (I mean the Formosa, now), that they are directly linked to, and conjure up, what is their opposite. Saramago says that good and evil do not exist. That one is simply the absence of the other. The lilies are on my terrace, white and perfect, and somewhere else there is pain. But they bloom anyway.