My life right now might best be described as a Manchester by the Sea kind of awful. A few weeks ago, my mother, who broke her hip back in March, developed an intestinal blockage after undergoing hip surgery, and then brain damage as a side effect of the procedure to clear the intestinal blockage. Apparently this is common for elderly people under anesthesia.  In any event, she’s now almost completely disabled and will require my brother and me to liquidate her property to pay for a nursing home or a twenty four hour home health care aid. In one “stroke” (pun intended) my family has gone from petty bourgeois to fully proletarian.

This morning I looked out of the window to see tulips in the backyard. How is this possible? I didn’t plant them. I don’t know anybody who did. Is there such a thing as a wild tulip? They have renovated the house next door. They have done landscape work to the park down the block. So it’s possible tulip seeds blew over onto what will soon not be my property, and bloomed this morning after the big rain storm. What do these wild tulips symbolize? Are they nature telling me that Spring always follows the Winter? Or are they nature reminding me that I’m living on a piece of property that will soon have to be sold? Are they flowers of hope? Or are they flowers of evil? I’d like to think that the yellow tulip is reminding me not to be a coward.

(Thanks to the people who got back to me and reminded me that tulips are grown from bulbs and not seeds. So someone planted them. I just don’t remember their being there.)