Tulips are such a special flower to me. I love not only growing them, but sharing them with others so they can bring a little bit of cheer into someone’s day. But my connection to tulips runs much deeper than simple enjoyment. They carry some treasured memories.
Every year in early April, right around the time my tulips were in bloom, I would bring them to my Grandma Musk for her birthday. She never wanted or needed much - just time together and a beautiful bouquet of my earliest flowers. She truly loved them and proudly showed them off to anyone who visited, bragging on how big and beautiful they were. Their soft scent and vibrant colors now bring me right back to those moments with her.
My grandma was a gardener herself. Her and grandpa kept a vegetable garden when I was younger, and I even have my grandpa's collection of notes and articles from the early 1990s, on topics ranging from growing garlic, to the square foot gardening method. Well into her 80s, my grandma continued gardening, caring for a beautiful yard filled with flowers. Gardening was something we shared, and she was always one of my biggest supporters.
In 2020, her health began to decline. It started with the isolation and stillness of quarantine and became more serious after she contracted COVID a year or two later. After a week-long hospital stay, she returned home on oxygen and was never able to wean off of it. Her strength and mobility continued to fade. And yet, in what feels like one of the brighter moments in all of this, she quit smoking cigarettes cold turkey, after nearly 60 or 70 years. She even said it was surprisingly easy!
For the next year, she experienced several falls, always insisting she was fine and could continue living independently, until one fall led to serious injuries and a long recovery. She never returned home after that. Instead, she was moved into assisted living, but she contracted COVID again, and only two months later had to be transported to a nursing home on hospice care, where she lived for another nine months.
On her final birthday in 2024 - her 90th - I brought her a large bouquet of flowers to brighten her room. We opened the blinds and looked out at the trees just beginning to bloom, and talked about gardening as I showed her pictures of my plants on my phone, as we always did. She passed a few months later.
When my tulips begin to bloom each year, these are the memories that come flooding back.
Flowers have a unique way of holding our stories. They create a powerful multi-sensory experience through their color, scent, texture, and even just the act of tending to them. This links directly to our brain's emotional center, so even long after those memories have passed, the nostalgia of those flowers remain.
It is my sincerest wish that flowers, no matter the variety, hold such a special reminder of a loved one for you.