#8Sunday Opening Lines-The Lilac Hour

Welcome to #8Sunday, the weekly blog hop where writers post eight to ten sentences of work. Over the past weeks, I've been featuring the opening lines of my stories. This week's opener is from The Lilac Hour, the first and title story of my short story trilogy. The narrator is 85 year old Sarah Snow, whose husband died when they were young. The tone is meant to be nostalgic, with a hint of sweetness. 


We called it the lilac hour. The name came from my Aunt Delilah, who had a jungle of lilacs in her backyard near the harbor. Every spring, they would open their fragrant buds of deep purple and gentle pink. And so it was that I pointed out those same colors to Zeke as the sun finished dipping deep into the bay and Zeke said, “Yes, the lilac hour.”

We were young then, Zeke and I, new to marriage and still a little reckless, and I thought the term highly romantic.

That spring, Zeke gathered lilacs, bushels of them, from Delilah’s garden and put the petals on our bed. Still dreaming, I awoke to the stubble of his beard grazing my neck and the delicious sweetness rising from those buds. I’ve never been able to pass a lilac bush without thinking of him, and the tenderness of early love. I’ve spent my life looking to find that moment again, that one perfect moment, of lilacs.
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