David Feuerstein

My neighbor’s wife loved tulips. She planted them in every bed and tended to them like a mother to her baby. Every day she weeded the beds, watered the tulips, sprinkled fertilizer. All this to ensure her purple, red, pink, white, and orange treasures lived to see the next day. Tulips are fragile flowers, though they outlasted her.

I knew when it happened, but I never asked him about it. The day after, I saw him toiling in the tulip beds. His movements were stiff as he tirelessly searched for every last weed. Afterward, he watered and fertilized as his wife had done. 

Three years have gone by since his wife passed. In that time, I never once saw him neglect the tulips. Even so, some were beginning to wrinkle and shrivel, signaling their final season.

Tulips died one after another. I felt bad for my neighbor, so I bought him some tulip seeds from the market. When I offered them to him, he only shook his head and said, “I think I’ll rest once these ones go.”

Slowly, the rainbow-colored beds took on darker colors. They turned brown before the bulbs separated from the stems and fell to the ground. 

The last time I saw my neighbor alive, he was standing on his porch smiling at the brown beds. I watched him and wondered what about dead tulips would make him so happy. The next time I saw my neighbor was when he was being wheeled out of his house on a stretcher with a blanket over him.

A new neighbor moved in shortly after. I watched him dig up all the dead tulips as he muttered something about leftover junk. As I stared at those bags of dead tulips, I couldn’t help but think of my old neighbor. I suppose he wanted to go with his wife’s tulips.