Bring on the Tulips

Greetings,

You may have noticed the lack of blog postings here lately. Put another way, it seems that over the last few months, I reduced the volume of original content on this blog to match that of the rest of the blog-o-sphere (Huffington Post, anyone?) While they rehash the daily news, mining it for valuable gossip and tossing out the uninteresting facts, this blog seems to prefer presenting nothingness as what it is.

Still, the total lack of content here has given my blog the abandoned appearance of your neighborhood GM dealership, and I am not okay with that. I had a job to do, and that was to report on my wanderings and share what I've learned from them, for better or for worse. As a blogger, I try to step outside of my life from time to time and peer back in to see what larger connections can be drawn between my own experiences and what's going on in the world at large. Since February, it seems I've lost the ability to be the outsider in my own life, casually observing events as they transpire and reporting on them for your reading pleasure. Instead, somewhere in between wrestling crab pots and getting in touch with my fisherwoman self, I lost my cool and my ability to step into the third person. I didn't fall down as a writer, luckily, only as a blogger, and I managed to record - in a small heap of nearly illegible legal pads - most of my whirlwind journey as a rookie deckhand in one of the world's most dangerous fisheries. (During this time, I also found myself out of not one but two separate laptops). One day, these notes may even manifest themselves in a more readable format, but don't hold your breath.
So that's as far as I'll go for formal excuses. In the meantime, however, another strange thing has happened, something that's made me question the whole idea that launched this blog (in its eventual form as a food-and-farm advocacy tool) in the first place. This personal revelation may not seem as momentous as the catastrophic earthquakes that weakened bits of our society's foundations in the past couple of months, or the fact that at this moment, all the oil trapped in the rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico seems to be gushing out and headed for the Everglades, but it's significant nonetheless. My confession - and it is a little embarrassing to admit in this context - is this: I have been admiring tulips.

Readers of this blog may or may not have recognized my longstanding commitment to tulip eradication. Really, any flower (except those that precede fruit, of course) may be considered frivolous and unnecessary to daily existence, but tulips, for me, have always been a worst offender. I felt this way even before I read Michael Pollan's (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma) opinion on tulips in his book The Botany of Desire. He puts it this way: "Among flowers, the tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless." Unlike most of the flowers that humans have domesticated and bred selectively to serve our purposes, the tulip has no scent, no edible parts, and no medicinal qualities. On the basis of its beauty alone, it still wielded considerable flower power at one time. As Pollan describes in the book (which I highly recommend), no other flower has been as amenable to the corruption of the free market. In 16th-century Holland, it launched a lucrative futures market in tulip notes - slips of paper that promised future deliveries of high-value tulip bulbs. At one point, a prized tulip (like the Semper Augustus in the image here) could go for more than the cost of a big house on the canal. Speculation escalated out of control, and when the bubble burst, individuals who had invested their life's savings in these promissory notes found themselves holding useless slips of paper, without so much as a bulb to put in their gardens.
Tulips bothered me for other reasons than their historical role in setting a precedent for irresponsible trade. On a personal, aesthetic level, for instance, they have always seemed far over the top. With their primary colors, unnaturally straight stalks, and uniform appearance, they seem to go against what is natural, with no charming qualities to redeem them. Daffodils are frumpy and frilly but still cute, in a way. Roses - well, at least they have their dignity. Even dandelions are edible. Honestly, I didn't see the point of tulips, and every time I saw one, I wondered why people couldn't obsess over something a little bit more substantial and, to get right to the point, edible. Also, I didn't like the fact that my name (Tuula) is often misread as ending in "lip", as if I might be the type of person who goes around identifying herself as the sex organ of a plant.
Given my zero-tolerance policy toward the tulip - both the word and the flower itself - the name of this blog came up rather naturally. Everything worked fine until this spring, when my hard-nosed stance against tulips began to gradually erode. Maybe it was the brutally cold December we had here in Oregon and the generally hopeless post-holiday feeling I was experiencing, but when flower stalks began poking themselves out of the ground in late January, I didn't experience the usual sense of nausea over the anticipated floral show. On the Oregon coast, winter is short-lived, but the rainy and wet spring, with its endless assault of Pacific storm fronts, seems to take six months. It's not that I looked forward to the day when I would have to nod to the charming faces of a crowd of gaudy, candy-colored blooms ecstatically announcing the arrival of spring. But when those flowers arrived, suddenly the ceaseless grey of the sky, the ocean, and the windy highway I drove every day was enlivened with pink, yellow, purple, orange and red flowers. I tried to ignore them, at first, but they mocked me from parking lot dividers and window boxes in town, from every single front yard in my neighborhood, from behind the crumbling brick along my grandma's front walk. Resistance was futile.

The tipping point came on a walk I took one evening through my neighborhood. I noticed about ten huge tulips growing in a neighbor's garden, looking like half-inflated. bubble-gum pink birthday baloons upon thick green stalks. Their enormous size startled me, and I had to have a closer look. I approached cautiously and peered inside one, noting how the petals just barely overlapped one another as they curved gracefully inward. I never imagined something  so orderly, so tame and pleasing, occurring in nature. I stared into the flower for a while, probably long enough for whoever was watching inside the house to consider phoning the poilce, but didn't touch it. It seemed like it would be a thing easily distuurbed. The next time I came across a smaller version of this marvel in my grandmother's front garden, I gently felt its petal. Just as I suspected. Smoother than skin.
The tulips, I had to admit, had defeated me. In all their uselessness, and despite their inane obedience to human selection and cultivation, they were beautiful and put joy into my day from that point forward. Now that I am back in Eugene, where spring is a bit behind the more temperate coast, I am experiencing a tulip re-run, and it's just as chidishly pleasurable as it was the first time around.
My war on tulips is officially over. I have called off the troops; they are frolicking homeward with ridiculous garlands on their heads. What does this mean for the future of the blog? I haven't worked that out yet. Like my attitude toward flowers, my approach to the craft of writing has changed. There are other projects that have eclipsed blogging in this venue, which I will hopefully share at a later date. Employment-wise, my next gig is with Northwest Youth Corps in Eugene, where I will be leading summer day camps for kids that allow them to experience food production first hand. (In other words, I will be happily demonstrating the finer points of playing in the dirt and greenhouse-grazing at the NWYC Farm.) I would love to start up a complimentary project involving some sort of educational blog that is kid-friendly. Right now, I'm still working on removing the crab-bait smell from my clothing and finding myself (another &%$!@) laptop.
So thank you for reading NoTulips, and stay tuned for its reincarnation. Many of you have shared with me that this blogging effort has been entertaining or inspring in some way (I even apparently recruited my replacement at Collins Farm!) and your encouragement has been incredibly helpful in keeping the words flowing. As soon as my next project is up and running, you'll be sure to hear about it. In the meantime, keep eating well.

Tuula(lip)