Considering Donald Trump, the siege of Kyiv, Omicron, and other things

At least the tulips are up.

Braving the last of winter freeze and the end of March snow, my tulips are back, poking their fat pearly green leaves toward the uncertain sun outside my southfacing windows. They’re looking well this spring; far better than too much of the world and seeming none the worse for the travails we’ve tolerated in the recent past.

So, you might well say, what’s the big deal here? Tulips are coming up in garden plots all over the place. It’s spring. What do you expect?

True enough, but let me tell you about these tulips…

These tulips are survivors. They were never supposed to be here in the first place, and surely shouldn’t be where they insist on being right now. You might say they’re the illegal malingerers of the plant world, claimants to botanical squatters’ rights. Stubborn Dutchmen, determined to be where they believe they belong.

Yeah, that’s a lot of motive to attribute to a few plants, but bear with me.

These are, after all, illegal tulips. Tulips living on the lam. Tulips wanted by the INS, smuggled in by my 18-year-old daughter who bought a couple of packages of tulip bulbs while on a layover in Amsterdam on her way home after her first semester in a German university. It was an impulse, a little extra Christmas present for her mother that she tucked into her carry on, tossed into the overhead and gave nary a thought to until confronted with the customs declaration that classified those tulip bulbs as botanica non gratia in the good old U.S. of A.

The plane landed. She retrieved her bag, showed her passport, and became a smuggler.

Come spring, Gayle added those illegal immigrant bulbs to the raised bed beneath the kids’ bedroom windows. She was the family gardener, ringing the house with roses, impatiens, begonias, petunias and pansies. In that spring ritual, I was just the spade man, indifferent to what was going in, but drafted to turn soil and rake it smooth while she settled each fragile seedling into its earthy nest. It was she who looked after them, watering and weeding while they flourished into a profusion of color.

The frost was barely out of the ground that next year when foreign flowers, warmed by the southern sun, broke through the untilled earth in a race with the eager dandelions to be the first to burst out in bloom.

And so it was, year after year. Spring after spring, the tulips made their way back into the world, unbidden, but, oh so, welcome after the long cold winter.

A dozen springs have come and gone since Gayle last welcomed her tulips from their long winter’s sleep. Some years ago, the gardener gone, one by one the flower beds were turned over to lawn grass and the raised bed beneath the south facing windows was raked down to become just so much more to mow. But before I tossed down the grass seed, I got out my little-used spade and, on hands and knees, retrieved the little brown nuggets holding the next spring’s promise. I gathered them up and returned them to the young girl, now mother with home, girls, and gardens of her own.

I smoothed over the wounded earth and the grass grew, like the grass grew on Gayle’s grave. Summer came and went, and as winter faded, there, amid the dead brown grass, clumps of fat, pale green tulips sprouted, untilled, unbidden; scattered at random where my raking had left them.

And they raced with the dandelions. Burst into blooms of red and gold, then sunk back into the earth. Not gone, but waiting again for the Marchtime sun, waiting again for spring, waiting again to overcome all odds to bring life and beauty to a world in need.

Again, they are back. Random clumps where only yard should be. Lifting my spirit as they lift leaf, then stem, then blossom until all creation catches up -- the green and flowering profusion declaring that life is good…very good.

But, Putin’s raising hell in Ukraine. There’s a new variant loose on the block. The Trumpers haven’t figured out who won the last election and are getting set to monkey wrench the next one. The ice caps are melting, the forests are burning, and all anyone talks about is the price of gas.

Still, if I can have tulips where tulips shouldn’t be, tulips where tulips have been dug up, mown down, crowded out, and trampled on, I’ll dare to nurture a bit of hope, though it surely feels that hope oughtn’t to be. Like those stubborn green leaves, it rises unbidden, forces itself to be seen, lays claim to its place in the sun, and lifts our spirits with a reminder that life is still good … very good.

If my tulips are back, should hope of better things be far behind?