Tulips in March

The tulips don't know it's still cold. Or they know and they don't care— which is, honestly, the braver option. They push through the last stubborn layer of frost like fingers reaching through soil toward a sun they can't see yet but believe in anyway. This is the defiance I want to learn: to bloom when nothing around you suggests it's time. The daffodils went first— the extroverts of spring, the ones who show up bright yellow and unapologetic, like a friend who enters every room as if the room was waiting for them. But the tulips— the tulips are the quiet ones. They arrive in rows, in ranks, in impossible colors that didn't exist in the gray vocabulary of winter: fuchsia, coral, the kind of red that makes you understand why languages invented the word "vivid." A single tulip is a cup holding nothing and everything. A field of them is a standing argument against despair. I plant them every fall and every fall I forget where. And every spring they remind me: the things you bury with love have a way of returning exactly when you need them. Not where you planned. Not how you expected. But there— sudden, impossible, insistent— coloring the world back in one petal at a time.