23 April 2024 (late frost)

late frost . . .

kitchen table tulips

touched by moonlight

18 January 2023 (ice-glazed snow)

ice-glazed snow

the grocery store tulips

shed their petals

9 May 2020 (snow)

late spring snow

disbelief all over

the tulips

14 March 2019 (tulips)

more snow

even the store-bought tulips

look desperate

7 March 2019 (tulips)

sun on snow

grocery store tulips also

leaning into the light

April 17: Paul's birthday

Raking last year's leaves

off tender spikes of tulips,

getting my hands dirty.

May 7: Mortality

A friend recently lost her father. While a death is almost always hard to take, it seems especially difficult to deal with when the whole world around you is so blatantly coming back to life.

So hard--
planning a funeral
while tulips are budding.

May 2: In my herb garden

Tulip leaves push through
the center of a sage plant--
power of yearning.

January 9: Oranges

Some days I just find myself craving a particular color. This morning I was drawn to orange--orange undershirt, some clementines with my cereal for breakfast, orange gloves as I headed out to soak up some sunlight. The need was stimulated, I'm sure, by my constant need for more warmth this time of year, as well as the mood boost the color offers when contrasted with the pale dirty snow out my window. It's a color that catches and embodies light, connoting Florida citrus and sunshine. Perhaps my body craves more Vitamin C to help me shed once and for all a niggling cold, and this attraction to orange is a way of getting me to ingest some healthful fruit.

The sight of tulips in my window near the fruit bowl helped satisfy my longing for this color, albeit not as tangibly as those clementines, which I devoured. 

And I've been fixating on a section of our prayer flag garland that sports five tangerine-colored pennants in a row, the only repetition in a string of 48. If I could translate those symbols, perhaps there's something I need to be learning there...

Fruit and flowers glow

in kitchen's weak, winter light.

Outside, dirty snow.

May 2: Freak Tulip

I was finally able to spend a bit of time puttering in the yard today and came across this one odd tulip growing just outside one of my flower beds. All my other tulips are red, so this one is an oddball of unknown origin. Lucky for the tulip, I've only had a chance to mow the yard once this spring, and thus it had enough time to pop up and blossom in a place I would normally have mowed.  

Where did you come from,
odd tulip gracing my lawn?
Glad I didn't mow.

January 31: Tulips

Last day of January. We're entering the heart of winter. Apart from bundling up and enjoying outdoor snow activities as much as I can, another thing that helps stave off cabin fever is an indulgence in fresh flowers. This time of year, I'm unable to resist the colorful bunches of tulips that beckon just inside Hannaford's sliding doors. Orange, yellow, red, purple--the colors exhale a warm breath throughout my house to offset the whites and greys outside our windows.

While my outdoor garden has been reduced to dry stalks sticking above the snow, indoors the tight buds of tulips slowly open their petals to reveal the sensual beauty of each blossom's secret center, something Georgia O'Keefe might have painted. 

In a few months, after the snow melts and the air warms enough that I can rake off my flower beds, green spears of tulip leaves will poke up through the leaf litter, one of the first signs of incipient spring. But for now, the simple pleasure of my store-bought beauties will see me through. 

Red hothouse tulip,

your heart's an exploding star

to melt winter's blues.