My sister called a couple of weeks ago and mentioned that the lilacs were blooming around our parents’ house.

Instantly I was back in the moment years ago when Mom and Dad welcomed me home for a visit. The lilac blossoms beside the back door perfumed the air as we hugged and laughed.

Welcome home.

The experience is tucked away in memory like a picture in a photo album, one that’s good to pull out on Mother’s Day.

Phone calls mean a lot when you’re 300 miles apart. For decades, Mom has called me at work on Friday afternoons to chat — trying to catch me after my last deadline of the week. The deadlines changed, but the calls continued.

Then, one Friday morning in March, my brother called to say Mom was not answering her phone, and would I try calling her? She didn’t answer for me, either.

So Worth went over and, getting no response to his knock, broke in. He found Mom in her favorite recliner, looking as though she had fallen asleep in front of the TV.

She had passed, as we say when we’re trying to soften the hard news of death. Her heart have given out.

Flashback to childhood and riding in the car, with Mom driving. Whenever she had to hit the brakes, she swung her arm in front of me for protection. It was a reflex, pure and simple.

Your mom probably did the same.

As I listened to Worth, it felt as though Mom’s mere presence on earth had been an ever-present arm of protection, and now it was gone.

Our family ties were not always the stuff of Hallmark cards, so there was a bittersweet aspect to coming together on the farm after Mom’s death. I’d been there a lot in recent months. Other family members kept a little more distance.

“Cantankerous” is the word that comes to mind here, with a dash of “feisty.”

Dad had died just six weeks earlier after a long period of decline. We thought Mom was doing OK and would be with us for years more. She said she was fine.

When you’re a kid, parents are just old, be they 30 or 40 or 50 or whatever. By the time our parents reached their 80s, our perspective changed.

Now we realized how very young they were when they got married, 19 and 20, and quickly had three daughters. After living in the shadow of our paternal grandparents’ house for nearly a decade, they bought a 40-acre farm. Everyone said they were crazy, but they had dreams and gumption.

It was heaven for kids. I remember years of riding horses, chasing puppies, picking strawberries, slamming screen doors (right as Mom yelled, “Don’t let the door slam!”) and running barefoot. 

The soles of our feet were tough as leather by the time school rolled around again.

My brother was born; bedrooms were added.

If Mom made a cake, I perched on the kitchen counter, waiting to lick the beaters.

At bedtime she read to us from an orange Childcraft book. I always begged for  “The Sugarplum Tree.”

She taught us songs like “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain When She Comes” and broke up our spats with the classic, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

As we grew older, Mom decided we were the perfect bridge foursome, Mom and we three girls.

We were a pretty good shopping foursome, too. Mom held out for big sales and stashed things away to be opened at Christmas.

I passed Mom’s 5-foot-2 stature in sixth grade, as my sisters had, too. But no one dared looked down on Mom when it came to respect. Yes ma’am. No ma’am. No sass.

She forbid me from driving around in Fredericksburg after dark — when I was 60 years old.

It wasn’t worth arguing about.

She was especially strict about the living room that she had furnished bit by bit, visiting junk stores and “antique” shops back when she and Dad had little money to spare. The room had Victorian couches covered in velvet, with porcelain figurines on the mantel and an out-of-tune piano in the corner.

It was more like a parlor — no eating or drinking in there, and your britches better be clean if you sat down. No plopping.

So we felt a little mischievous, even in our grief, gathering in that room after Mom died. We sifted through photos that had been locked away for decades. School pictures. Photo-booth candids. So much more.

We half expected Mom to walk in and fuss about what a mess we were making. She did not, of course.

Her spirit just hovered over our shoulders.

I vacuumed the room thoroughly before we left.

The lilac blossoms have faded for this season, and I can’t imagine a spring without them. 

No one lives on the farm  now; we have a lot of things to figure out. I’d like to freeze it all in time so I can go back and reminisce whenever I want. But that’s not the way things work.

So I’ll stash a few more images in my mental photo album and cherish the memories — memories of Mom and Dad and home.

Elizabeth Cook is editor of the Salisbury Post.