In praise of bulbs

Since moving to the Pacific Northwest some thirteen years ago, I’ve come to appreciate bulbs. Not the light kind, the flower kind.

Though my California childhood house had a big yard in the front, I can’t say that I grew up gardening. In the front of the house we had two pine trees nestled in a huge patch of ivy next to the carport, facing a hedge of bay leaf trees. We had persimmon and orange trees. Lots of greenery, but my sister and I didn’t really garden. I remember a patch of marigolds that we tried to grow in our backyard, but they didn’t do very well.

Gardening’s something that I came to know more in the Pacific Northwest. It’s one of the most popular pastimes here. People in our neighborhood care about their yards, about terracing and native plants and lawns. This makes us sound like a region of senior citizens, I know—with all due love and respect to any seniors reading here—but it does make for some lovely city neighborhood living.

See, we have a true spring in the Northwest. After months and months of early darkness, of pewter skies turning to charcoal, we gravitate towards bright color wherever and whenever we can find it. Our grocery store sells primroses these days, to help us remember what fuchsia, violet, and daffodil look like outside. Last week, I found myself silently thanking the anonymous person (or force of nature) who planted a tiny patch of yellow crocuses along my running trail. Oh, thank goodness, spring’s coming. We can start counting down to the light.

Spring, when it comes, is a gorgeous thing here. Apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, plum blossoms yield showers of petals washing onto the streets in frothy tides. Daffodils stretching their necks, russet dahlias blooming like fireworks, pink camellias unfurling their ruffly skirts. And then, when the sun’s out: vibrant colors against blue-silver skies and silver-blue water. Spring is when I breathe in all that color, all that light. Some days I can’t believe I get to live here.

Yet it’s the bulbs that I’ve been thinking about lately, perhaps as a way to describe what’s been happening here on the blog. I’m still learning about bulbs, but I understand that they often lie dormant for seasons. Some people pack them away in their garages, in the wintertime. If you’ve ever seen bulbs, you know that some of them are rather unsightly. No symmetry, no smoothly self-contained packaging like a seed. They’re gnarled, and knotty, and even brown-papery in places where dead foliage might have order ventolin online uk been. You might even think, “Really? Something beautiful’s going to come out of here?” Bulbs are something like the Ugly Duckling of plants. In the spring you have to plant them, trusting that they will grow quickly with the sunlight, and eventually explode into color. Their blooming sneaks up on you, and almost before you know it, a cluster of red tulips have returned in your yard, the tulips that you planted from last year’s Mother’s Day present.

That’s how I’ve been feeling about writing lately: unglamourously, unpoetically, something like a bulb. After the start of a new semester, and a series of minor colds in the family house, the book project is coming off of the back burner. Clearly, the private MFA has the perks of flexibility and sick days, but its main downside is its lack of structure and accountability. I have missed writing here and tried not to scold myself for posting less regularly. I want to keep this space as a space of pleasurable focus, at least for now. So my degree in progress has been dormant for a while, but I’m planting it again with hopes of spring. The Northwest spring allows you to do that.

We’ve got an amaryllis bulb in our kitchen, since our kindergartener C had one in her classroom. Amaryllis flowers grow well indoors, and they grow quickly. The class got to measure the growth of the stem every week. When we saw amaryllis pots at Trader Joe’s, C asked us to get one. It’s the first living plant we’ve welcomed back in the house in years. The amaryllis bloomed in late December, with red flowers like a hibiscus, at least in my range of flowers familiarity. But the flowers and leaves didn’t last for very long; we were on holiday vacation for most of that blooming. The flowers wafted pollen onto C’s bookshelf in her bedroom, and eventually their long green stems shriveled to light brown. We had to explain to her that we had to remove these parts of the plants, in order to make room for the flowers to come back.

Now I see that bulb every morning next to our kitchen table. The green stems and leaves are coming back again, and they’re growing at odd angles, reaching for that elusive Northwest February sunlight. Every few days I’ll water it, and check on it, and turn it around to straighten out the growth. That’s how I want to come back to the blog. And writing. And light.

Thanks again for returning, and reading.