As You gave to me,
Let me give Your grace.
Let me be Your hands today.
Let me be Your hands today.
––Ken Bible, “When I Face You, Lord”

The little tulip gazed up at the sky popping with color. As it watched, the trees steadily swallowed the sun, leaving behind a halo that arched over the treetops. Bright cotton-candy clouds drifted slowly to the left, their bodies puffed yet strung out––the sky an impenetrable azure blue. What a delight this days-end is, the tulip thought. Even now, as the hour wore on and the sky became translucent and the light behind the trees turned a deep yellow, with the tops of the trees scraggly like witches’ hair.

The cold nipped at the tulip’s pink petals, stiffening them as though they were delicate shards of glass. The tulip’s roots shriveled in the ground as the late spring frost threatened its arrival; but the tulip still faced the dimming sky. There is something about barrenness and the dark and the sting of the lingering winter that stirs my soul not to despair, but to reverence, the little flower mused. It remembered its birth, how it felt the hot soil of mid-summer around its bulb, then hibernated in the frozen winter ground. Come spring it spread its tiny roots one by one into the softening earth, saw the sun for the first time as it shimmered overhead––oh, the brilliance of it!––and unfolded its soft petals to feel the wind and tempests of rain. It did not regret its life, nor did it fear death, but knew it was only a matter of minutes until the last frost emerged. Already, the tulip could feel the frost begin its final sweep over the land, seeping into the ground and freezing the grass like needles. The trees’ upper branches transformed into claws reaching towards the graying, smoky clouds. The little tulip straightened up its stem and opened its petals as wide as they would go; and as it absorbed the last remnants of light, it did not regret its hint of life, but merely regretted that its petals had not been wings.

***

The old woman rose with the sun. She stepped out of her apricot-hued house which blistered and peeled like a burn, wedged between two hunchbacked firs. The evergreens’ tips, burdened by needles and age, touched the house’s roof. The old woman plucked weeds out of the garden in the misty dawn. A spring breeze fluttered the woman’s dress around her ankles, as she bent low to pull thistles with gnarled fingers.

Years ago arthritis had crept into her body, infecting first her knees and then her back. When it reached her fingers her painting suffered. She could no longer paint the iridescence of her garden: the pastels and vibrancy of tulips; tomatoes glowing red in their cages; pumpkins and gourds with their ridges of shadow and light. But tulips she painted the most. Canvases were strewn about her house by the dozens, filled with pale and deep purple tulips––tulips of every color––single tulips and fields of them growing wild, every canvas flecked with one of her little muses. But when her fingers slowed and swelled, the paintbrush and oils had to be laid to the side.

So the old woman plucked. It was mid-morning, and the sun was perched on the tops of the evergreens. The weeds did not come out easily after the last frost, and the woman feared the tarp had not protected the plants from the freeze––but the soil underneath gave way like coffee grounds, though a bit stiff, and the plants welcomed the light. Something caught the woman’s eye at the far end of the tulip bed. There, estranged from the rest of the crowd, stood a lone tulip that the woman had neglected to cover with the tarp the night before.

“Ah, my little tulip,” the old woman said, peering at the pale pink flower.

And, kneeling in the soil, the old woman brought her lips near the tulip and blew the frost, which had settled like diamond dust, off its petals. In that second the wind blew and shook the trees, and the light of the sun struck the little flower––the frozen petals radiated with brightness and wind. Thawed, the tulip sank to the earth and lay still.

You were a brave little soul, the old woman thought, but were you not pink the moment before? Now you are as yellow and pure as the sun.

The old woman gently uprooted the tulip and held the pale yellow flower in her hand, wilted and lovely. The woman beheld the flower, closed her swollen fingers around its petals, held it to her chest. There in the forest glade the old woman stood, eyes closed and face upturned. Then the rain fell on the deep wrinkles in her face, and the flowers bounced as the drops hit their petals, and the woman swayed with the breeze and the tulips.