One Bunch of Tulips for No Reason

It was the kind of cold where your ears go numb before you've made it half a block, and I went to the farmers market anyway. Not because I needed anything. There was nothing on a list. I just wanted to be outside somewhere that had a point to it, even if the point was just that someone drove their truck here this morning and set up a table and decided this was worth doing in February.

I ended up staying a lot longer than made sense. I walked the whole row of stalls twice. Someone was selling honey and jam. Someone else had root vegetables I didn't recognize and didn't buy. And then there was a woman at the far end with two buckets of tulips, pale pink, white, one bunch that was almost the color of a bruise, and I stood there long enough that she probably thought I was going to ask her something meaningful. I just bought the pink ones and said thank you and moved on.

they were the last bunch

I've been thinking about the blog lately, what it's for, what I want it to be, and I wrote something about it a few weeks ago that I ended up submitting for my Creative Writing class, which still feels strange to say out loud. The process of writing it twice, once for myself and once for a stranger with a grade book, made something settle. I don't know exactly what. But standing at that market this morning, holding flowers I didn't plan to buy, felt like the same kind of thing. Not a resolution. Just a small, specific decision that was enough.

The tulips are on my kitchen windowsill now. They're probably going to last a week. That felt like the right amount of time for something you bought for no reason on a Sunday in winter.