I love tulips! And if you’re going to grow them you’d better love them, because they give you maybe two weeks (if you’re very lucky) of bloom and then six weeks of dying foliage. If you want them to come back the next year you have to let the leaves stay in place and die back naturally, as that’s how the bulb stores food. You could just whack off the leaves as soon as the flowers are done and then plant new bulbs every fall, but doing that is 1) expensive and 2) lots of work.
What you’re supposed to do, which I’ve never succeeded at, is to plant other flowers around the tulips that will grow up as the tulips die, hide their leaves, and bloom themselves. I planted poppy seeds around my bigger tulips (which are long gone, alas) and sweet alyssum around these, but I’ve seen no growth of either one. So I’m stuck for now with what I have. [Note that the image for this post is a stock photo; once again a photo didn’t make it to the new website.]
I’ve been consciously taking notice of these flowers every day. And they’ve reminded me of other pleasures that can fly by without notice. When we lived in Northern Virginia we loved the dogwoods that bloomed every spring. There was one huge pink one that I’d pass on the way to Gideon’s school. It was so gorgeous! And then the ground beneath would become covered with petals. Soon it was just another pretty green tree, the show all over until next year. A colleague said that part of the dogwood’s beauty was that they didn’t last very long, so you had to enjoy it when you could.
Last weekend we sang our wonderful chorale program, and then it was over. Jim said he especially liked our song about the phoenix, “Across the Vast, Eternal Sky” by Ola Gjeilo. I had said in the post I wrote that I found the choice of an accordion as part of the accompaniment to be inexplicable, but when I heard it actually being played by one of our members I changed my mind. He coaxed beautiful sounds out of his instrument, sounds very different from the squeeze-boxy ones that were in our practice recordings. I found myself standing next to him after our Saturday concert. “Aren’t you sorry it’s over?” I asked. “That’s the nature of a performance,” he replied. “It’s transient.” Just like the dogwoods and the tulips.
Tonight we’ll sing the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And then that will be all over. All the work on the notes, and the struggles to learn the German words, and the waiting around in our rehearsal room until it’s time for us to go on: all past. Here I sit writing this at around 4:30 in the afternoon. I can hardly wait to get up there on stage; it’s such an exciting piece. Something will inevitably go wrong; something always does. That’s okay. As the wise accordion player said, that’s the nature of a performance. I want to savor every single moment.