“‘La Bamba,’” I offered.
We laughed again, both smiling and settling into the comfort of being together.
“You can call me Noelle-o Mell-o all you want. I don’t think anyone else in my life would ever call me that because I’m not known for my mellowness.”
“I’m surprised by that. I did picture you as more…”
“Quiet?”
“Subdued might be a better word.”
“Try repressed? Noelle shook her head slightly. “At least that’s the word I would use to describe myself while I was under my parents’ roof.”
“Was your childhood pretty awful?” I kept finding myself caught off guard whenever Noelle mentioned her parents or childhood with a bitter edge.
Noelle shifted in her seat and made a right turn before answering. “I’m sure my childhood was much better than most people’s.”
“Your letters never hinted at a lot of angst.” I was still fishing for details. But I didn’t know if I had the right bait on my line of thought or if I would be able to haul in the truth if she did bite.
After a thoughtful moment Noelle said, “I think whenever I wrote to you over the years it was always a downshifting time for me. I would stop all the running around, breathe deeply, and take inventory. I’m sure a lot of my letters were like American Christmas letters. We still get a few of those every year. They are always a tidy, upbeat summary of the highlights for that family, along with a photo of everyone smiling. I think for a while most of my letters to you were like that.”
“Not all of them. You and I both have opened up a lot to each other over the years. I know I’ve written things to you that I wasn’t ready to talk about with anyone else.”
“It’s been the same for me. Especially in my early married years. I think I’ve always wanted to give you a good impression of me, but at the same time I needed to open up my heart to another woman who understood what I was feeling. Especially an American woman. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, it makes a lot of sense. I felt that sisterly sort of sharing in our letters. I always have. Our correspondence over the years has probably been better for us than we realized.”
“You mean as an outlet?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of therapy.”
Noelle chuckled. We were heading down a long stretch of flat road with rows of houses on either side.
“You wrote such fun letters, Summer. I saved almost all of them in a big cookie tin. Someone gave my mom a big tin of shortbread cookies for Christmas one year, and I loved the red plaid on the side of the tin. When I went back to Wyoming for my mom’s funeral, I found the cookie tin in the attic, and I brought it back with me.”
“I remember your writing an e-mail and telling me that.”
“I did tell you, didn’t I? You know, sometimes, especially since everything is done so quickly now with e-mail, I forget what I write. I compose e-mails in my head, and then I’m never sure if I sent them. Do you do that?”
“All the time. I don’t think I forgot that often with letters. Maybe it has something to do with the tactile act of touching the paper and holding a pen. I don’t know, but I agree with you. I’m forever telling my kids that they never answered my e-mails, and they say, ‘What e-mail?’”
“I don’t know how you keep it all straight with six kids. I don’t know how you did it when they were all at home and in school. I have great admiration for you, Summer. Here I was, giving a round of applause to Wayne; you deserve the praise as well.”
“I feel as if all you’ve done since I arrived is affirm me. Thanks, Noelle.”
“It could be I’m trying to make up for a few times when I slipped up in being supportive in our friendship over the years.”
“What do you mean?”
“I never told you this, but I felt guilty when I wrote to tell you I was expecting Tara. You had been trying so hard to have children and had gone through those terrible miscarriages, and here we weren’t even trying, and we were pregnant. I think I was five months along before I finally wrote you.”
“I was happy for you. I really was.”
“I know you were. You were so sweet about sending gifts for both the girls. I did a horrible job of remembering your children’s birthdays and—”
“Hey, don’t do that. Don’t compare. I never felt slighted by you. You expressed genuine interest and love for all our children every time you asked about them. That meant just as much to me as if you had sent cards to them on their birthdays. We show our love in different ways. That’s okay.”
Noelle glanced at me. “You’re right. It is okay, isn’t it?”
I smiled back. “Yes, it is.”
The ease of our give-and-take conversation felt as natural as if we had spent many hours together like this, side by side, over the years. Even though I had fluffed up the notion early that morning that I could have gone home before breakfast and felt satisfied with the visit, I was glad I was still here.
I knew in my heart that if I opened up to Noelle about the biopsy and my encroaching fears, she would lovingly process all my thoughts with me. But I didn’t want to process them. I wanted to push them back into the basement of my emotions and simply live. I wanted to celebrate and enjoy life the way we had last night at dinner. I was determined to gather as many rich and meaningful experiences as I could this week. I planned to save them in the scrapbook of my memory so I could return to view them fondly in the days ahead. I would look at this time with Noelle and say to myself, Well, at least once in my life I did something I wanted to do.
Noelle turned the car into the large parking area at the tulip gardens. The lot was filled with cars as well as tour buses. We weren’t the only ones who had decided to visit the tulips that morning, and I soon saw why.
The attention to detail in the opening to the park was breathtaking, with a path leading us into a garden area with blossom-filled trees. Carefully laid-out groupings of brilliant yellow daffodils were circled by stalwart grape hyacinth. Bunches of red tulips stood together like a squirming elementary school choir ready to break into song as soon as the first note of spring was struck. A sea of thick green grass surrounded all the flowers and trees.
I stopped and pulled out my camera.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking pictures.”
“Already? This is only the entrance,” Noelle said, “not the flower fields.”
“But it’s so beautiful.”
She looked around at what I was admiring. Behind her flowed a steady stream of visitors moving on toward whatever it was that lay past the end of this carefully designed path.
“You’re right. It is beautiful. Do you want me to take a picture of you with the tulips in the background?”
“No, I just want the tulips.” I snapped shots and was grateful we had entered the digital age. I would have gone broke on all the rolls of film I would have needed to snap pictures to my heart’s content.
“Here, stand right where you are. Look this way.” She had pulled out her camera and was taking a picture of me anyway. With her face still behind the camera, she said, “This is so I will keep my promise.”
“What promise?”
“I promised that one day, when you came to the Netherlands, I would take your picture so your smile could end up on someone’s refrigerator. Do you remember?”
I smiled broadly. Yes, I remembered. And so did she. That was what made our friendship golden.
“Come.” Noelle motioned for me to join her in the flow of people moving toward whatever tributary lay at the end of this garden path. We stayed on the walkway, taking our time to view the meticulously groomed flower beds that lined the lane. Photo ops were presented to us at every turn.
At the end of the trail, we came into an open view of a flat field alive with color. Rows of flawless bright tulips filled the space as if they were a lake reflecting a sunset with ribbons of red, yellow, pink, orange, and white. All the rows were perfectly lin
ed up. The eager-to-please tulips stretched toward the powder blue sky, strong and brave on their vivid pogo-stick stems.
I never had seen anything like it. I never had felt such speechless appreciation for something as simple as flowers. I wanted to cry but had no tears. Only a tightening in my throat.
“What do you think?” Noelle took off her sunglasses and looked at me as if trying to read my expression.
“It’s…beautiful.”
“Wait until you see them up close. Come.” Noelle led the way with her camera in hand.
The tulips grew in mounds of rich, dark earth. Between the straight rows of tulip mounds were well-trampled “gutters” in which visitors were permitted to walk through the muddied earth to get up close and personal with the upturned beauties. Hundreds of visitors strolled up and down the designated narrow pathways between the blooms. The groupings of people seemed to bob along in the lake of beauty like sailboats and rowboats set adrift on a calm day.
The first row we traversed bore white tulips. I stopped to stare. At a distance they looked like simple ivory tulips. Up close the delicate flowers became more intricate. They had what looked like ruffles along the top edges. Inside the cuplike petals were faint streaks of pale pink you wouldn’t notice unless you stared straight down into them to discover their hidden beauty.
“Unbelievable,” I said under my breath.
Noelle snapped a picture of me bending close to examine the details of a white ruffle-edged tulip. I’m sure my expression when I looked up was one of childlike awe. I felt like a child experiencing one of the simple wonders of the world for the first time. I had seen tulips, but never had I imagined a tulip like this, with such intricacies.
And that was only my first tulip.
I looked up from the singularly amazing ruffled bloom that had so captured my attention and once again felt the sense of being afloat on a lake of tulips. Such vivid colors! The sunlight highlighted the blooms so all the colors were sharply focused. For one heart-tugging, breathtaking moment, I closed my eyes. It seemed impossible to take in so much glory all at once.
With a broad, sweeping gesture, a cool breeze brushed past us and moved through the tulips like an invisible hand rustling them from an enchanted sleep.
“Look!” My voice was just above a whisper. “They’re dancing!”
Noelle grinned and made soft agreeing sounds. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I love coming here. Do you want to walk around now and see some more? My favorite ones are over this way. Come.”
I followed her the way a child wades into the water, feeling safe because a protective hand is within reach. In my mind’s eye I wasn’t envisioning Noelle’s hand being in reach; I was picturing God’s. Surely His hand was the invisible one that had just brushed over the sleepy heads of the tulips and sent shivers down their stems and mine. I wondered if He loved seeing His children delight in the sight of such beauty. Did moments like this thrill Him the way they thrilled His children?
“I came here last week,” Noelle said, breaking into my moment of contemplation. “I brought a woman who recently started coming to our church. Her family doesn’t yet know that she’s attending church, but she never had toured the tulip fields in the seven years she’s lived here. I offered to bring her, and when I went to pick her up, her mother and grandmother came as well. Her grandmother especially loved the tulip fields. Even though it rained, we still trekked up and down all the rows.”
“I see now why you said that wooden shoes come in handy here.”
“Yes. Now you see. This is a good place for wooden shoes. I should have brought mine last week. Today it’s not so muddy.”
As we talked, we strolled past a lovely lineup of petite yellow tulips. We were nearing the center of the field, making our way to Noelle’s favorites—the deep red ones—when she said, “Look up.”
I drew my fixed gaze from the endless line of tulips and glanced back to the parking area. There, far to the left, was a sight that had been hidden from our view by a dense grove of trees.
“A windmill!”
“There you go. Your first windmill. We only have a few hundred left in the country that still work. I don’t think that’s a working one.”
“Not to sound like a foreigner or anything, but what do windmills do exactly? I mean, I’m guessing they are a source of energy—”
“Nonpolluting, natural energy,” Noelle interjected.
“Yes, but for what? Grinding grain or something?”
“Yes. When thousands of windmills were here in the lowlands, the wind, of course, turned the sails and ground the grain. But they still are being used to distribute water and drain the polders. We have lots of water issues here, you know. Lots of canals. At Kinderdijk near Rotterdam, if we go up there, I’ll show you some windmills that still are working to keep the floodwaters back.”
“So it wasn’t the little boy who stuck his finger in the dike that saved Holland from the ocean? It was really the windmills that saved the day?”
“I have no doubt the legend of the little boy contains some truth, but, yes, the real heroes are windmills,” Noelle said. “Much of the Netherlands is below sea level.”
“Like New Orleans.”
“Yes. And we all saw what happened there when the waters weren’t held back.”
“I never realized the Netherlands was so vulnerable.”
Noelle bent down and cupped her hand under a bloom in the first patch of deep red tulips we came upon. Her motion was similar to the way a loving mother would cup a child’s chin and look into sweet eyes with unconditional approval.
“Yes, vulnerable. Aren’t we all? And yet somehow we remain protected by God.”
I nodded, feeling vulnerable there in the midst of all the fragile beauty. Vulnerable and yet protected by God.
Am I protected really? God obviously allows devastation in His world and in His people. What about with me? What is He doing with my body? What is He going to allow?
I shook off the disturbing thoughts and looked closely at the tulips in front of me.
But apparently Noelle’s thoughts hadn’t floated away from the tulips as mine had. “This is where I bought the bouquet I have on the table at home. They sell bouquets at the gift shop. You might have noticed that picking the tulips isn’t allowed.”
I felt a primal urge to stealthily pluck just one, simply because Noelle told me I couldn’t. “There are so many. Why don’t they let people pick what they want and then charge them by the quantity on their way out?”
“Because if you pick them at this stage, the bulb comes up with them. You have to cut them. Besides, the tulips here aren’t grown for bouquets. Almost all the tulips in the Netherlands are grown and harvested for their bulbs. The bouquets are not the big commodity; the bulbs are. They are exported around the world.”
She leaned down to gently stroke the soft petals of an exceptionally large red tulip as if it were an endangered species and needed tender care to keep producing.
I lifted my camera to catch the shot.
She adjusted her position so the bevy of beauties framed her face. The sunlight seemed to ignite her blond hair, causing her to look as if she were wearing a halo. The contrast between the red tulips and her golden hair was stunning.
“You look like a little Dutch girl. All you need is one of those hats with the wide wings that stretch out the side and curl up at the end. Like the flying nun’s hat. Remember that TV show?”
Noelle laughed. “Yes. Here the traditional costumes are called klederdrachten. You only see elderly people wearing them at special festivals. They’re hard to find. It’s kind of like going to San Francisco and trying to find a bonnet.”
“Well, you look like a darling little Dutch girl just the way you are, you and all those little red-hot-mama tulips.”
“I think I would rather be described as a red-hot mama than a darling little Dutch girl.”
“As you wish, red-hot mama. Now go ahead and pose for me all you want. I’ll
keep taking pictures.” I lined up another shot.
“Here. Take one of me tickling the tulips. That’s what my girls used to call it when we came here. They would go up and down all the rows and touch the flowers like…what was that game we used to play? The one where you tap people on the head, and then one of them gets up and runs after you?”
“Duck, Duck, Goose?”
“That’s the one! My girls had a game like that. They played Duck, Duck, Goose with the tulips.”
“Only I’m guessing the tulips never got up and chased after them.”
“Well, one time…” Noelle broke into an engaging grin just as I snapped the shot. “I’m only kidding.”
“Keep on kidding. It’s making for some great expressions in these shots.”
I kept clicking away as if I knew what I was doing, which I didn’t. We switched places, and Noelle got me to smile and laugh with the red-hot mamas while she took pictures.
We continued our self-guided tour for over an hour. She took pictures of me, and I took pictures of her, and then we took pictures of our taking pictures of each other.
The laughter flowed. Some of the shots I took were up close while others were taken from the start of a row of tulips. I was interested in trying to capture the uniformity and precision of the rows, the heights of the flowers, and the symmetry of the opening blooms.
Hundreds of other visitors around us were doing the same. Never had I heard so many different languages at one time. Yet everyone, from every culture and language, seemed to have some sort of equivalent to “Smile” or “Say cheese” right before taking a shot. I wondered what they were saying.
The visitors also seemed to all say the equivalent of “Beautiful!” or “Amazing!” in their own languages. In a way this field had been transformed into an open-air cathedral, and Creator God was being praised in dozens of languages by hundreds of souls in awe of His handiwork.
“Did you know that tulips originally came from Turkey?” Noelle asked.
“Seriously?”
She nodded. “They aren’t indigenous to the Netherlands, but everyone thinks they are because the Dutch turned them into an export industry more than four hundred years ago.”