Olivia Schneider pulled down her mask and inhaled the perfume from purple blossoms, their sweetness casting the engineer back to her Wisconsin kick-the-can childhood and her mother clipping lilacs for the dinner table.
Last spring, the simple act would’ve flouted signs imposing pandemic rules for the Harvard-owned Arnold Arboretum’s more than 400 lilac bushes. “Please enjoy the lilacs from a distance,” they read, warning that they should be treated “like any other surface that can spread Covid-19.”
— Read more in A Sign of Post-Pandemic Spring: Sniffing Mother’s Day Lilacs at Bloomberg.
