I'll just tell you: I'm a real sissy for the tulips. I tiptoe through them like a regular falsetto.
If you don't understand the reference, then you probably are younger than 60. You might google Tiny Tim. May he rest in a bed of tulips.
My fascination started years ago--late in the last century, I think.
Shalah and I had one of our best vacations, starting in Amsterdam. We caught a bus to Haarlem, where some famous tulip place existed. Franz something, I think it was. Franz Rosen, I want to say.
I wasn't terribly excited by the outing, until, that is, we got there.
There were fields swarming with tulips as far as you could see. I remember bright and beautiful colors and all manner of variegation.
I recall the tulips somehow standing straight and yet bending to flicker and glisten against a gentle breeze.
They would ask where you lived and invite you to purchase your favorites. The deal was that they would mail the bulbs to you at the proper time for your climate zone.
We bought. Pretty big. I may still be carrying residual damage on the American Express.
The bulbs came in stages, before and just after Christmas, and I took the bulb-planter and poked hundreds of holes in the front yard and back.
I ringed the backyard in tulips. I overheard Shalah lamenting to someone that I had arranged the flowers in that way rather than in assorted smaller bunches. But she seemed to think it was kind of forgivably cute, worthy of a pat on the head.
That early-to-mid-spring at our house was a wonderland, and I do not lie.
People would stop their cars and get out and look and take pictures. They'd ask things like where we found those tri-colored tulips at the side of the front steps.
From time to time in later years a smattering of those would come back or we'd buy a few bulbs locally. But it was never the same. And the squirrels would get them. I guess it was the squirrels. The bulb holes would be opened and empty, the dirt upturned, bulb peelings left as evidence.
So late last summer or early fall I got one of those marketing emails and made the impulse buy. Some outfit would sell me tulips and send me the bulbs when the time was right for me.
I made my selections, a hundred bulbs, and punched in my credit card number.
It was my biggest impulse buy since the tangerine and turquoise Fiestaware showed up on the porch that time.
It bothered me that the bulbs arrived in a box almost immediately--in October, I think it was. Surely it wasn't time to plant them, I thought, and I put the box on the back deck and went my merry way.
And I pretty much forgot about it. I noticed it in mid-January and lamented to Shalah that I'd wasted money and squandered bulbs that would never make tulips now.
She grabbed the box and the bulb hole-puncher and proceeded furiously to start injecting the bulbs into pots and sections of flower beds on the front, side and back of the house.
I regretted that her noble effort was surely wasted--that October was too early, but mid-January too late, being learned as I am in matters of tulip timing.
Today, being obsessive, I counted 64 tulips, front and back and side--bright yellow changing to orange, bright orange changing to yellow, solid yellow, solid orange and then these little miniature tulipy things that peek out in six cup-forming strands of orange and yellow variegations that give a striped effect.
I don't recall ordering any tiny striped tulips.
Apparently I like orange and yellow and a blend--in tulips. I don't want to wear them, necessarily.
In Shalah's mad rush to put the bulbs into dirt, she crowded several into pots that now look to be almost overpowered in oversized blooms. Somebody asked if those were double tulips. No. They're highly concentrated tulips.
We have a dirt-filled window box with latticework as siding. Or had. Over the winter the bottom fell out. So there is this one orange tulip, grown from the collapsed dirt, peeking through a gap in the latticework siding, offering itself for your metaphor of choice.
Saturday was the full festival around here. Today most of the tulips are on the downhill side, giving way to the white dogwood and the about-to-pop red azaleas.
I'd post pictures but we have too much instant phone photography these days and not enough word description and imagination.
And I'd play the ukulele but I don't know how.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/09/2015