Sitting outside on a balmy, seventy-degree morning in the middle of January, with flip-flops on my feet and the slight sting of sunburn on my shoulders, I’m moved to observe that this is my kind of winter. Seventeen winters spent trying to heat a house with the thermal efficiency of a birdcage has left me dreading those stretches when cold air sweeps in from the midwest, collides with Gulf moisture, and spawns that unholy combination of humidity and frigidity that sends a chill through the wallets of old homeowners throughout the South. And while I’m sure we’ll pay for this winter’s dearth of hard freezes when the swarms of insects begin to hatch in spring, right now every day that dawns to sixty-degree temperatures, green grass and a flowering Japanese magnolia in the backyard is a pleasure to behold, so I for one am not about to complain.
In our household, I’m really not the cold-natured one. I’ve never minded low temperatures much, am happy to swim in cold water or take to my bike on days when the temperature is in the forties. Really, it’s my wife who really dislikes the cold—the one who visibly wilts when the mercury drops; who disappears beneath layers of wool and flannel and fake fur in about November and doesn’t emerge until March. Still, I guess anyone who grew up in a house where it was occasionally necessary to pour anti-freeze into the toilets could be forgiven for launching a pre-emptive strike at the first sign of frost. So it came as a real surprise on a chilly morning a week or so ago when, with cheeks aglow and eyes sparkling, she swept into the kitchen in a blast of frigid air and announced breathlessly that hands-down, her complete, absolute, favorite time of year was right now: the middle of winter.
This can be explained with a single word: Bulbs. Each year, the first sighting of a narcissus or clump of paperwhites awakens the fanatical horticulturalist and compulsive purchaser of gardening gloves in the woman with whom I share my life. For her their emergence within the brown-gray palette of a Louisiana midwinter is nothing short of magical. They are absolutely her favorite things—a fact that, as her husband and the father of her children, I accept with complete equanimity. So in the context of this issue I feel compelled to talk about them.
We all have things that crank our tractors. But where my wife is concerned the sighting of a stand of bulbs in a roadside ditch or unkempt backyard doesn’t so much crank the tractor as send it rampaging out of control, through the fence and into a pond. From the time the first tender shoots of Lent Lilies begin to appear in early January she becomes a woman possessed, cruising back roads and suburban side streets with a shovel and plastic bags in the trunk, ready to spring from the car and effect an opportunistic harvest at a second’s notice. There is no fence too high, no underbrush too thick, no guard dog too belligerent, to keep her from her prize. Last winter while driving through a less-than-auspicious part of town during peak hour, she accidentally rear-ended the vehicle in front of her because she was ogling a huge stand of Byzantine Gladiolus sprouting in a yard behind a chain link fence. While standing on the side of the highway trading insurance details with the collidee she managed to ascertain that the house was unoccupied, and began plotting how to get her hands on some of the bulbs. It took her twelve months, but I have never seen her happier than the day she drove past and discovered contractors at work on the house. She screeched to a halt and slipped one of the guys a twenty. During the surgical strike that followed she managed to separate out enough glad bulbs from the main clump to keep her ecstatically covered in topsoil for weeks.
You know what they say about birds of a feather, and over the years Ashley has fallen in with a gang of similarly fanatical bulbhunters. Together they trade favorites, swap tips, and cruise the countryside executing dig-and-dash raiding missions. They zealously guard their secret stashes and adhere to the true bulb-hunter’s maxim, which is to always leave more than you take … (so you can come back and get more next year). So, if you see any late model family cars with booster seats in the back loitering along country roads this time of year, watch out. There may be a bulbhunter operating in your neck of the woods.
Oh dear; Ashley’s probably not going to thank me for outing her on all of this, but neither will these revelations come as a surprise to those who know and love her well. After all, when you say to your seven-year-old son, “I love you more than all the stars in the sky.” And he responds, “Wait, Mama; you mean you love me more than all the bulbs in the yard …” you have to accept that you’re wearing your passion on your sleeve. When it comes to the first lilies of springtime, why would you have it any other way? Once a bulb-hunter, always a bulb-hunter. That’s a passion she can be proud of, any time of year.
