Lilacs on a birthday

I am looking at a piece of art. I am touching a long sleek smooth wooden creation with wholes you can cover with your fingers and make music. I am fingering a birthday present that made me speechless.

My dear friend Mats and I have this very nice March tradition. Our birthdays are three days a apart from each other, and for some years now we have been throwing a birthday party for ourselves and our families and close friends. As our birthdays happened this week, the party took place yesterday.

On my front yard there are some lilacs. Some of them planted by my grandfather, some by my father. Some old fashioned what we call Farmers Lilacs, some the more modern and foreign Hungarian Lilac. My mother didn’t like the Hungarian ones. The flowers not as pretty and without that breathtaking lilac smell that fills the air in the early summer evening here.

A couple of years ago it was time to take down one of the Hungarian Lilacs my dad had planted. It had grown too big, taking up too much space in the garden. I am colored by my mother’s opinions when it comes to the Hungarian ones and didn’t shred too much tears about it. But as it was a fruit of my father I had plans for a future life for it.

My friend Mats is a very interesting person. He works in computer programming, although he used to be a classical music radio producer at the Swedish National Radio. But his training is as a flutist: recorder and baroque flute. Educated at The Conservatory of Music in Haag, Netherlands. And, he is very passionate about carpentry. Although Mats’ heart is in the Baroque I would say he is quite a Renaissance man!

Mats is combining two of his skills – the flutist and and the carpenter – in a very special craft: he is making baroque traversos, wooden flutes. Beautiful pieces of art created from out of special types of wood: they have to be very hard, such as boxwood, rosewood, different kinds of fruit wood, and…

…lilac. So, of course I handed the thickest stems of my dad’s lilac over to Mats. Who let it dry for as long as it needed to and then started the slow, delicate and very precise craftsmanship to make a traverso flute out of it.

I love Mats’ instruments. I am not a flutist, but I love the sense of them, the touch and the looks. And I love the sound. That I can’t make myself.  I would want one, just the way I want a gorgeous pair of shoes that I cant walk in because my back wouldn’t agree. But it so happens that I, on occasion, by those shoes anyway, as “sit shoes”, shoes to wear at a sit down dinner. And I also perceive them as design objects, finding place for them as decorations in my interior design.

At the birthday table yesterday our families were gathered around tasty food and exciting conversations, we are all interested in music and active in different ways. Then, out of a sudden, Mats is handing me a beautifully wrapped box. And inside… there are three wooden pieces. The middle one -the body - with six finger holes. The bottom one - the foot joint - with the one shining key. And the top one - the head joint - with the essential mouth hole. Lilac is a light color wood, so Mats has stained it a darker brown. I am carefully without breathing putting together the different sections that are held together by lathered parts that in the Baroque days used to be ivory but are now of course plastic.

I am breathless. I am speechless. I can’t remember that I’ve been so pleasantly and overwhelmingly surprised ever. I can’t believe that this is happening. I can’t believe that Mats is giving this flute to me. I know it’s worth thousands (kronor), and to me of course much more than that.

Even making a sound from a flute is hard to start with. Finding the right angle for the air to meet the wood and the mouth hole. But Trouble 1 finds it right away. And is hooked.

I am touching my precious flute. Smelling it. Caressing my cheek. Letting about 20,5 inch (52 cm) of lovingly handicraft wood slide through my hands. I know it’s going to end up at Trouble 1’s. As much as I would like to keep it here as a design object Trouble 1’s is of course the right place for it. So I am enjoying the flute’s presence with delight while it’s still here.

I am holding a large piece of compressed life in my hands. My dad’s Hungarian Lilac. Which my mom didn’t like because she preferred the Farmers Lilacs planted by her father. My dad’s lilac had to go though in the end to let more light and space in. Which became wood substance for my friend Mats. Who made a beautiful instrument out of it. And eventually gave it to me as the most unexpected bouquet ever, on a very casual birthday. And I can already imagine the music Trouble 1 will bring out from it. His grandpa’s lilac.