The Tulips in Washington Park

Albany is known for its tulips but I can’t grow them. Every fall I plant bulbs with the hope that there will be spring blooms and every year the squirrels dig them up or the birds snip off the buds, the petals strewn across the ground. I have never heard of birds doing this before. But it’s okay that I don’t have tulips because every year Washington Park is bursting with them. Every year I know that I can immerse myself in beauty that I could never grow in my own yard.

My husband and I were engaged near where the tulips grow, near the Moses fountain and the willow trees. It was early July and we had just moved to Albany. I was twenty-one and about to start graduate school. I had known the engagement was coming, had found the ring hidden in a drawer of our new apartment. It was a ring we had rolled change in order to afford, a ring he had hidden since our move. We wouldn’t see the tulips for the first time until the following year, but the park already meant something to us.

The tulips feel like old friends, friends I don’t need to plant or care for, friends that are there every year no matter what. I think of the different versions of me who has gone to see them: the engaged graduate student, the newlywed, the expectant mother, the mother. Sometimes I feel as if I could slip back in time and become any one of those versions again, the years melting and swirling together. 

There have been times that I haven’t visited the tulips, haven’t made the short trip to the park. Never again, I tell myself. I’m learning to seek out beauty, learning to embrace it when found. Because beauty is fleeting—life is fleeting, and I don’t want to miss it.