My name is Beth Anderson. I am thirty-seven, I work the front desk at the veterinary clinic in Viroqua, and my husband Neil hauls milk for the co-op out of three different farms.
We live in the small yellow house on the corner of my father’s land, a half mile from where I grew up, in the hills of the Driftless where every road has a ridge on one side and a creek on the other.
Her name was Loretta Anderson. Nobody ever called her Loretta.
The first bulbs went in the fall of 1984, the year she married my father and moved out onto his farm. Forty-two years ago.
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She bought a dozen red tulip bulbs at the hardware store in Viroqua for a dollar and put them by the mailbox because she said a farm wife should have one thing at the end of the lane that did nothing but look nice.
The next fall she added a dozen. Then two dozen. When I was in grade school she was ordering them by the box from a catalog in Michigan and planting them every October after the corn came off, on her knees with a coffee can of bone meal, six inches down, pointy end up.
When the cancer came, three years ago this past August, she worked the strip until the week she could not stand. The last thing she asked me to carry out to the truck was the box of bulbs she had ordered in July, because she knew there was no more time.
I put them in the garage. I could not look at them. I could not throw them out either.
In October, Gabe found the box.
He was eight. He had been quiet for two months, the way boys go quiet, and he came into the kitchen with the box in his arms and the cardboard soft from the damp and said, “Mom, did Grandma forget to plant these?”
“No,” I said. “She didn’t forget. She ran out of time.”
“Then we should,” Gabe said. “Before it’s too late for them.”
The three of them planted those bulbs on the last Saturday of October, with a bulb trowel, a bucket and a pair of Neil’s old work gloves. It took them four hours.
Gabe read the directions off the box out loud. Tessa made a line of string. Lily put her bulbs in upside down and Tessa dug them back up and fixed them without being asked.
The next May, the strip came up like she was still there.
For three Mays after that, the kids’ strip bloomed beside my mother’s, and the church ladies slowed their cars to tell them so.
Every spring Gabe stood at the mailbox with his hands behind his back like a little museum guide. Dad would sit on the porch with his coffee and not say a word, which was how I knew it mattered to him.
Then, a year and a half ago, my father married again.
My aunt Kay tells me I am hard on Colleen, so I will give her this. Dad was lonely. He was sixty-nine and eating canned soup over the sink.
Colleen was a widow from the Lutheran church in Westby who brought him a hotdish the week after the Fourth of July and kept bringing something every Thursday. By Labor Day she was sorting his mail. By Christmas she had rearranged his kitchen so that he could not find the colander.