The Return of the Marriage Plot
September 22, 2023
In my neighborhood this past spring, the Parks Department was digging up and distributing spent tulip bulbs to anyone who wanted them. I got in line next to a woman who looked to be about 60. As we waited for our bales of bulbs, she cheerfully recounted to me the story of how she had first planted tulips one fall day when she was pregnant with her first child some 30 years earlier. She’d been on hands and knees, digging in the ground, when her husband had come outside and seen her. He’d scoffed meanly, she remembered, and told her that she looked like a bus — ugly and base, down in the dirt like that.
By the time the tulips bloomed the next spring, her baby had arrived and she had left her husband. Tulips always made her smile, she told me, her arms now full of a new bunch of them. They reminded her of how she had come by her liberty.
