A Prescription For Tulips

The light of the early spring sunset is soft, its colors muted. It comes through the wide window at a slant and the shadow that is thrown by the vase of tulips in the middle of the kitchen table is the palest gray, like someone has tried to erase it.

The tulips are over a week old now. Their straw-like stems are beginning to curve down toward the tabletop, yielding to the inevitable pull of gravity. A handful of petals lie scattered at the base of the vase that belonged to my friends’ grandmother, each of them making me think of a silent movie heroine on a fainting couch, the back of her hand against her forehead in resignation.

Fields of Grace is a you-pick farm outside Columbus that exists to support a ministry “to women who have endured any type of trauma and to provide caregivers with a restful retreat.” My friend Melissa, a retired midwife who is herself a restful retreat, took me to the farm after I commented over and over about the bouquets of tulips on the tables and countertops of her farmhouse, tulips that I had to be convinced were real.

Cold and wind greeted us at the farm, but it did not matter. I had never seen tulips in such abundance, never seen tulips in so many shapes, never seen tulips in such luscious colors. I walked up and down the rows, clippers in one hand and a bucket in the other, equally thrilled at my good fortune and dismayed that I could not take them all.

I was particularly fascinated by the tulips that did not look like tulips, at least not like the tulips I learned to draw in elementary school – three triangles at the top of a rounded bucket. Some of them were full and blousy like the chiffon skirt of a ballgown; some were velvety and stiff; some were nonchalant and droopy, wrinkled like worn linen.

But it was the colors that had me entranced. I stared and stared, searching my memories and all the words I knew, trying to imprint on my hippocampus the exact shade of each one. The purple tulip, the one that resembled a peony in its lushness, was the color of grape cough syrup. The iridescent orange variation, with its fleck of hot pink, exactly matched mercurochrome, the now-banned disinfectant that bathed the cuts and scrapes of my childhood. The pink tulip, whose delicate petals resembled suede, was the color of amoxicillin, the liquid antibiotic that is every new parent learns to request at the first sign of illness in her newborn.

Later, I scribbled down the descriptions on a scrap of paper and it was only then that I realized that for each of the floral hues – purple and orange and pink – my brain had chosen something curative, something medicinal to represent the particular wavelengths cast upon the cones at the back of my eyes. My memory, my perception had interpreted my experience among the flowers as therapeutic and restorative.

Staring at the tulips now – the ones I brought home and at which I have gaped in awe as their initial beauty faded into soft decay – I congratulate myself on understanding. Not just the healing properties of flowers, though the tulips have healed my spirits with each concentrated gaze and sideways glance, but also the idea that medicine, in most cases, has to be administered. We can not, as it turns out, heal ourselves.

Despite the human bent toward independence, we are made for connection, most especially when we are hurt or lonely or grieving. We are meant to live not only our own lives, but to be a part of the lives of others, to bandage the wounds of a suffering world with whatever tools we have at hand.

Including, sometimes, something as beautiful and ephemeral as a field of tulips.

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