Tulips

A Time Machine

I’m in Wyoming for a few weeks to spend time with my granddaughters. I’ve rented a little house for the duration to give everybody some space to breathe and stretch out, mostly myself since I am in my hard writing season and need some room to work without distraction. 

The house reminds me a lot of a house I lived in when my children were toddlers. This one is the same era, early twenties I’d guess, with solid walls and plaster ceilings and creaking wooden floors of narrow burnished pine. The heat comes up through big grates on the floor and in the harsh cold, the girls and I hold one foot at a time over the blowing air. I’m transported to the years when I was a young mother, trying to make my way as a writer when no one in my world thought I could do it, or that it was even a good idea to try. 

But in this rental house, I’m not reminded of myself as a writer, but as a mother. When I went to the grocery store to stock the cupboards here, I impulsively added two bunches of tulips to the basket, and when I got back cut the stems so they’d fit in a small blue glass to put on the kitchen windowsill. Then of course, I had to take five or six photos with my iPhone to capture the still peace of them. 

One of the only things of value I owned that long ago time was a 35 millimeter Minolta that I’d saved pennies to buy for myself, the first big purchase I ever made, a camera that went with me everywhere. Then, as now, I loved the way things looked on windowsills, a tiny crystal vase with coleus cuttings, a pair of rocks, an entire diorama of sea stars and shells and an angular vase of rocks at home in Oregon. Today, it’s the tulips, defying the icy cold with their delicate beauty. I love the accident of the blue glass. 

As I walk by a sleeping girl in her bunk bed, I think of her dad when he was a buttery little toddler, hair soft and fuzzy, a white cat curled up on his pillow. At Christmas this year, another big cat curled up on his massive shoulder whenever he sat on the couch, but it turns out he likes enormous dogs so there won’t be as many cats in his future. 

Time feels mixed up. As the girls and I drink chamomile tea before bed, I think about that first garden I grew behind that house, planting chamomile and mint and zinnias that got powdery mildew so badly I finally gave up on them. The boys loved to pluck the miniscule yellow and white heads of chamomile in their mouths, and leaves of mint. My mother warned me that they shouldn’t eat anything out of the garden like that because they might poison themselves, but as I was fairly sure they wouldn’t, I showed them what was edible and what was not.  I feel the India cotton skirts I favored then sweeping around my calves, catching lightly on blossoms. 

This morning in Wyoming, it is 14 degrees. One child is deeply asleep in her bunk bed, fighting off a little cold. The other is half colt, half little girl for a few more minutes, scrolling on her phone from the couch she decided was more comfortable than the bed. I thought they’d want to go back to their house after a long day yesterday, but they still wanted to spend the night with me, and I welcomed it.  Soup for dinner, another round of Uno, cleaning up the kitchen in the dark winter night, feeling the echoes of myself as that young mother, certain only of her fierce love for her children, her need to make a rather tattered house and yard into a home, with plants and meals eaten at the table, and games with the children.  I’m driven to making a home even in a rental of a few weeks, needing those flowers, a place to put shoes. I didn’t value that as the creative gift it is, for myself and the people around me, because it was a thing women did, making healthy food and making a grimy porch more appealing with a hanging basket, a painted chair rescued from a garage sale. I value it more now, take pride in being a good home-maker. 

Now, I am aware that this time with these young beings will speed quickly by, that soon the eldest will be a teen, and her sister is even now shedding the softness of little girl to become a colt, a dancing girl. They’ll be teenagers falling in love and filled with wild emotions, and then be adults, with children of their own, and maybe I’ll be lucky enough to stick around long enough to feel the echoes of time back to now. I’ll buy tulips and take a photo of them in a window. 

Has anything ever transported you back in time like this? Have you ever undervalued something you do because it’s something the women in our world have traditionally done? Do you have a ritual like my tulips?