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In the back corner of my garage, buried beneath a frayed and faded area rug just next to the blue recycling bin, is a black wrought iron arch. This arch used to sit atop a tall gate that opened into the front yard of the house where I grew up.

I suppose I should mention that it was really just a townhouse (a phrase uttered so often by my world-weary father that it now jumps out of my mouth automatically, like a single word, "just-a-townhouse"), and a pretty small one at that. My parents moved in right after I was born, following the loss of another baby girl who would have been my sister. At the time, both of them were intently focused on fresh starts, new beginnings, bigger things to come. This house, just a townhouse, was supposed to have been a mere stepping-stone on the way to something better.

And then a series of unforeseen and sustained financial hurdles forced us all to stay put; me along with my parents who gradually grew more disillusioned, distracted, distant and bitter from one day to the next as this tiny house crowded around us and seemed to crush their spirits. When we finally began to depart, many years later, it was in the way that brittle leaves fall from a diseased and dying tree: my father moved out after the divorce, I moved out after college. Only my mother still remains there, growing older and more fragile every day; and she's preparing soon to box up her belongings and be on her way. These belongings, I'm certain, will include several dusty snapshots of a smiling family that, so far as I can recall, actually existed once upon a time.

And so when the fence and the gate were damaged recently after a violent thunderstorm, I made a point of retrieving that arch. It's rusted and weathered and scuffed and faded, but its proximity -- even buried, as it is, in my garage -- provides a peculiar sense of comfort. Just sitting there, all by itself, it prompts memories of popsicles, trick-or-treating, summer vacations, tooth fairy nickels, dog-washing, firefly-catching, campfire cookouts, birthday songs, and Christmas mornings in one tumbling, contended, buoyant jumble. Though of all these countless memories, the best and clearest of all involves the giant lilac bush that grew across the street, sharing its signature springtime scent each year. I remain absolutely convinced, to this very day, that the fragrance of lilacs captures and recreates the simple anticipation and laughter of childhood, suspending it in the air like jewel-colored fruit on a vine.

The thing is, I've found that I really need these memories. They help to camouflage another, more acrid and sinister recognition; one that whispers furtively about the dissolution of dreams, the frustration of adulthood, the shame of falling short. In my numerous moments of doubt, it cruelly insists that I've utterly failed to push beyond the meager station my parents managed to attain; the one that engendered such destructive disappointment.

This is because my husband and I, for several years now, have lived in a townhouse. Not a cottage on the lake with a big backyard. Not a sunny split-level with a breakfast nook and a whitewashed picket fence, or a hammock in the trees, or a walk-out finished basement. Just a townhouse.

My patient, supportive husband reminds me – correctly, and at regular intervals -- that this is a decision we've made together, one that facilitates other choices in our lives; choices that allow us to extend our worldly impact and direct our focus outward. I, too, repeatedly remind myself that any form of shelter deserves our abundant gratitude; that much of the world's population would give a great deal for a solid roof overhead, clean drinking water, medicine, family, food.

And yet in a country that's bursting at the seams with prosperity and expansiveness and material success in nearly every direction, how difficult it can be to exterminate our own arrogance, to control our zeal for comparison, to surrender our human ambitions, to relax our grasping fingers, to eliminate from our vocabulary that harshly judgmental, prideful, stinging, accusing four-letter word.

Just.

Over the numerous years that my husband and I have lived here, I’ll admit that I've experienced less-than-grateful moments during which I've compared myself, relentlessly, to my own family and where they ended up. It's worth noting that these moments concentrate my attention – wholly, mercilessly -- on the "have-not" aspects of existence, creating their own free-falling spiral. Eventually, these mental bouts of self-castigation work their way around to what is, somehow, the most painful jab of all – the idea that I'll never be able to plant my very own lilac bush beside an entrance gate that's topped by a wrought iron arch. 

I was reflecting upon this recently, our troubling human tendency to focus on what we don't have. I was pondering these things as I walked outside to tend the small container garden that lines our front walk. This is something I've done probably hundreds of times, each and every summer: watering this clay-potted smattering of blooming red geraniums, begonias, petunias and marigolds; lost in my own private thoughts; never paying much attention to my surroundings. On this particular occasion I'd arrived home late from work, just after sunset, and I stood there hooking up our garden hose in the deepening twilight.

And as I moved among the pots with my watering can, I was suddenly struck by the overpowering aroma of lilacs. The scent hit me so forcibly, in fact, that I stopped in my tracks, convinced that I was simply reliving another long-lost memory. I looked down at the shadow of our hedges silhouetted against the porch light; hedges that flowered purple in the spring. Hedges that, up until now, I'd utterly dismissed, assuming them to be some variant of wisteria or spiraea or hydrangea. Except that in this moment I now leaned down, and gazed straight ahead into the darkness, and took another experimental sniff. Lilacs -- definitely, without a doubt, lilacs. All this time, planted right here in front of me, blooming every year as they patiently awaited my notice. 

How often our human senses, subdued by shame and pride, indignation and ambition, can fool our perceptions and steer us in the wrong direction. How easy it is to grumble through our days, overcome by such a wall of frustration and resentment that it entirely overtakes our field of view. How blind we can become to the things that bloom before us. Sometimes the sun needs to set, I think; sometimes we need to walk for a time in darkness, so that another sense can take over, with greater truth and purity, and reveal to us what our weakened eyes could not.

In the end, it's true that families can dissolve. Photographs can fade. Gates can splinter and crumble and fall down. Yet still, after all, a single arch remains -- a silent connection, a serene reminder that curves protectively like a sentinel over each of our rocky and winding paths. Weathered with time, rusted yet whole, never losing its shape, lovingly forged from iron.

"Do not doubt in darkness what you've been shown in the light."

- Dr. V. Raymond Edman