The Tulips Along Pine Ridge Road

So when I came back down that hill in May with Lily on my hip, I had a name for what I felt, and it was not surprise.

I called Dad at four that afternoon. He was in a rehab bed at the hospital in La Crosse, nine days past a new left knee, with a walker beside the bed and a physical therapist who had made him sweat through his shirt that morning.

“Beth,” he said. “Everything okay out there?”

I stood in my kitchen with my hand flat on the counter and heard my own breath. “Dad, Colleen mowed the strip. All of it. Mom’s and the kids’. The whole quarter mile, in bloom.”

He did not say anything for a moment. In the background I heard someone wheeling a cart down a hallway.

“She said it was getting weedy,” he said finally.

“It was tulips, Dad.”

“I know it was.” His voice cracked on it. “Let it lie, honey. Please. She has her nerves, with all the changes, and I just got through the surgery, and I can’t do a fight from this bed. Let me get home first.”

I could have said a great many things. I could have said that she waited until he was out of the house on purpose. I could have said it was the one week in the year people drove out to look.

I could have gone to the town board on Monday and asked who owned that road ditch, because I knew perfectly well how little she would like that question.

But the land was his, not mine. It ran right to the road. If I made him choose that afternoon, between a daughter he had known for thirty-seven years and a wife he had known for two, from a hospital bed with a walker beside him, I knew who he would pick, and I knew he would never forgive himself for it.

I will not tell you that was strength. I would call it love and fear in about equal measure.

“Okay, Dad,” I said. “Get home first.”

“Thank you, honey.” Then, quieter: “I’m sorry. I’m no good at this.”

She mowed it again in June. I heard the mower from the garden and stood there with a hoe in my hand. She did it a third time in the middle of July, short as a lawn, and when I walked down there that evening there was not a green leaf left on that road.

This is the part I want you to understand, in case you have never grown a tulip. A tulip puts all of its work into the bulb after it blooms. The leaves are the kitchen.

You leave them alone for six weeks, until they yellow, so the bulb can eat and get ready for next year. Cut them, and the bulb starves. Cut them three times, and you have a quarter mile of bulbs lying in the dirt with nothing left to give.

Colleen was not stupid. She knew exactly what she was doing, because she had gardened for fifty years. That is the thing I kept coming back to. She knew it would kill them.