Bend in the Road

Many yards in Vermont have old lilac bushes, some planted generations ago by farm wives who watched sons and husbands march to the Civil War along these roads, and read Whitman's elegy for Lincoln:
"When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring."