"Tip-Toe Through the Tulips"

What a fabulously aliterative title. And the song is very sweet and bouncy. I'll still sing it, even though I hate tulips.

We have a few planted in front of the house, but the yard is not my responsibility, so I'm just glad to have even a minimal input there. And it's odd, when I thought about what I did want in our yard, I thought of lilac, dogwood, rhododendrons, ferns, crocuses: all the plants that were meanful to me from my own childhood. And memories of that time are possibly the biggest reason that I love crocuses (their heads popping up through the snow!) and think tulips are just incredibly boring (when they kind of look like big crocuses in some ways). We didn't have tulips to speak of then. And I still dislike impatiens, bought new every spring by my Dad, and I had to weed the silly things all summer long.

But our childhood does have this wacky hold over us. As a parent, I'm always thinking about this. How will my daughter's life be different than mine because she started taking piano lessons at 5? Because she sees her parents doing yoga, meditating, drinking wine? Because we live in the city, not in the country, not in the woods, and absolutely in America? Because I'm a massage therapist and she can always ask to have her back rubbed by a pro? Because she goes to an alternative elementary school and not the 'Now-art-and-music-free!' public school? Because we have sunflowers, and hollyhocks and yuccas?

But right now I'm thinking lilacs: the smell of the bush at the end of my parent's driveway, the purple fragrant flowers in spring. Dogwood: the perfect tree to climb as a kid, low branches, not too high, flowers for my mother's breakfast on Mother's Day. Ferns, rhododendrons: summers visiting my grandparents in their cabin 'up the mountains', walking up the mountain, drinking from the spring that ran across our path, bringing home tiny plants to plant in our rock gardens. Crocuses: at my parent's home since before they bought it, multiplying for every spring, white and purple and yellow across the lawn.

Even though my parents still live in that house, I can never go back to my childhood there. But it shapes me still, and lives in me in technicolor. I like it.