for the love of lilacs

One evening, my husband arrived home with an armful of lilac flowers

Now that lilacs are in bloom/ she has a bowl of lilacs in her room/ and twists one in her fingers as she talks. - T.S. Eliot (Portrait of a Lady)

‘Lilacs make me think of you’, a friend said to me. We’ve known each other since university, where we studied poetry together, which was when these lines from Eliot’s Portrait of a Lady caught in my head and st…