Tulips at Midnight

a lesson from my mother about time

She had come home early, 
sometime just after midnight. 

Bending over in her sparkly top and white tennis shoes, 
she is digging up the dirt lining the steps with a spoon. 

The glowing cherry of her cigarette dances in the dark. 
Her coffee mug sits perched on the railing. 

I brush my hand up against the porcelain.
How long had she been out here?
It isn’t hot, but it is warm.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Planting tulip bulbs,” she says.

She holds one up in the air and examines it,
cigarette hanging from her mouth. 
She looks back at me.
Even in the dark, she is able to read my face.

"Flowers. They grow into flowers,” she says.

She tosses a bulb at me, bends back over
and continues scraping away with her spoon.

She stands back up, 
takes a drag, 
and points to the hole she’s dug.

“Put it in here."

Under the autumn moonlight, her sparkly top twinkles. 
Her forehead wrinkles.

"We're going to line the stairs with them."

Pointing, she outlines the stairs.

I try to imagine the wide, gray chipped cement stairs 
pathed with bright, cheery flowers.

"It'll be pretty,” she says.

She points down at another hole she has dug.
I place the bulb in its shallow grave.

She grabs her mug from the rail and takes a seat at the top of the steps.

"Tulips,” she takes a puff of her cigarette. 
Exhaling, she creates a stream of smoke 
connecting her to the sky.

“They’re perennials,
which means, we plant them once 
and they grow every year. 
Red and yellow tulips every year. 
I think anyway.”

My mom bends down and pats the dirt
burying my tulip
the veins in her thick hand prominent in the dark.

We continue to work together under the streetlights and the moon. 

I look around at the neighbors’ houses. 
Their windows dark.
I guess as they should have been at that time of night. 
Or that early in the morning. 
Whichever way you want to look at it.

"How long before they grow?" I ask.

"Not until next spring," she says.

"But it's October. We have to wait that long?"

The idea of waiting makes me anxious.

"The beauty of a tulip takes time to grow," she says wiping her brow.

The space between her eyes scrunches together.
She is looking at me, but 
I'm not sure it's me she sees.

I can tell her mind is going, but
I don’t know where.

Note

What truly requires your patience and time? Who or what experiences in your life taught you this? In what ways have you used this knowledge that yielded the results you sought? Has there ever been a time where there was no amount of patience and time that would produce the path you were hoping would emerge?

Write

My mother’s daytime was the nighttime. I didn’t sleep well until she came home from work, which often times wasn’t until 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning.

This was the musician life, but it allowed her to stay home during the day with her children. She told me during one of our Saturday morning coffees that all she ever really wanted was to be a mother.

She wasn’t a musician who sought fame and fortune. Music was a passion for sure, but it was also how she paid the bills. It wasn’t a hobby. It was her work. She was incredibly talented among being other things - kind, loving, caring. She was a mother to anybody who needed mothering, which at times was difficult to understand but am starting to the older I get and the more like her I sense myself becoming.

Planting tulips in the middle of the night with my mother wasn’t the moment I learned that life’s beauty needs time to grow - or at least I didn’t realize it at the time. It’s only recently that I’ve started to grasp this idea.

I think it’s interesting what the brain chooses to store in great detail in the long term memory bank. Although I’m not absolutely positive exactly how this moment unfolded, I do remember for sure it was the middle of the night in the fall after she got off work, and she was planting hairy looking bulbs in the ground with a spoon that later bloomed into tulips.

Coincidentally, my mother later passed away in the fall. I like to think of her now as a bulb planted in the ground who is taking her time to bloom, unsure of what form she will take. Sometimes I see her in my daughters - facial expressions and body language. When I look in the mirror, I see her eyes. There are times where I hear her when I talk or sing. Pieces of her blooming for brief moments of time.

But to respond to this prompt more thoroughly - I would say that it was experiences over time with both my parents that forced me to practice patience and make allowance for time.