When we first moved west to Washington, we lived for a year in Mount Vernon, Washington, in Skagit County. Then we moved one county north to Whatcom County and purchased a home in Birch Bay. Our mailing address is Blaine, which is a border town, with the US/Canada line running through the municipal area. There are two official border crossings in Blaine. Between those two official crossings a person can walk right up to 0 Avenue in Douglas, British Columbia. The only streets on which you can drive across the border are the official crossings, but there is no fence or barrier that would prevent a person from illegally walking right across the border. We can see Canada from our upstairs bedroom window.

We are happy in our new home, but there are some things about the city of Mount Vernon and Skagit County that make it a very appealing place as well. We really enjoyed our year of living there. The month of April in Mount Vernon and the surrounding rural area is the annual tulip festival. 85% of the tulip bulbs commercially produced in the United States are produced in Skagit County, primarily at four tulip farms averaging about 50 acres each. The tulip farms are open to the public year round and they have shops on them that sell bulbs and a variety of other products. This year, with Easter landing on the last day of March, the tulip festival has a slightly early start with festivities coming this weekend.

It is a delight just to take a walk through the tulip fields when the flowers are in bloom. In addition to selling bulbs, the tulip farms sell cut tulips and provide large quantities of cut flowers to markets around the country. They plant the bulbs in rows and the fields are striped with rainbows of bright colors. In addition to the tulips, there are fields and fields of daffodil bulbs. The daffodils are just reaching their peak blossom right now, with tulips to follow closely in the next couple of weeks.

Locals know that you don’t have to make your visit during the official week of the tulip festival to see the beautiful fields. The next few weeks also offer delight to the senses with a bit less traffic than the week of the celebration. A lot of people from the large cities of Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia make the journey to Skagit County to view the tulips and take part in tulip festival activities.

I’m not sure which day we will make it down to Skagit County, but going to see the tulip fields is on our list of things to do in the next couple of weeks.

Last fall we made a trip to Skagit and purchased tulip and daffodil bulbs at one of the tulip farms. Our daffodils are blooming brightly in a bed on the south side of our house and there are tulip plants springing up in several different beds with promise of bright flowers. I think our tulips are at least a couple of weeks away from blooming, but I’m no expert and there have been several warm and sunny days that have increased the rate of growth of the plants in the garden.

It is still an adjustment in thinking for me that gardening season arrives before Easter. While our friends back in South Dakota are bracing for a predicted blizzard Easter Weekend, I need to get out and mow our lawn in the next day or two. We have a small lawn and mowing it doesn’t take much time at all. It is certainly a lot less effort than clearing the snow from our driveway in South Dakota was for all of the years we lived there.

Our church in place of the tradition of Easter lilies to decorate the sanctuary on Easter morning, has a tradition of decorating the sanctuary with blooming tulips. Like our South Dakota church sells Easter lilies that decorate the sanctuary and can be taken home after the service, this church sells tulip plants. While Easter lilies won’t over winter if planted in a South Dakota garden, tulips planted here will produce bright blooms for years to come. The blossoms might not be timed to the holiday, but the plants will be big enough by Easter to hold the promise of blossoms to come.

Writing about the changes in gardening, it seems like those changes are small and the adjustment to them would be easy. However, in reality, although this is our fourth spring here after we retired, we are sill adjusting to the changes. A change in location and weather is only part of the changes through which we have gone in recent years. Like the rest of the world, the Covid-19 pandemic had dramatic effects on our lives and our patterns of living. More dramatic, however, was moving away from dear friends. We lived in Rapid City for 25 years and we have wonderful friends there. It has taken time to develop new friendships in our new home. We are beginning to develop some deep friendships here, but it still takes a lot of effort and those relationships are not as natural as our South Dakota friendships became over the years.

Holy Week has long been a time for me to focus on grief and I have used the remembrance of the events of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life as a way to draw together my own experiences of grief and loss. These days, I am aware of the grief that comes from a move and a major life change. It was clearly time for us to retire, and we needed to move away from the church that needs to develop new leadership and towards our family that is an important part of our support network as we age. Still, there is much loss and grief in having made those big life changes. I still miss work and we miss the people and community of the church we served in Rapid City.

Life moves on. Spring comes again. The flowers bloom. And the promise of resurrection lies just around the corner. When Easter comes, the blooming tulips will treat us with a reminder that loss and grief, thought always present, are not the final words on our spirits. And that is good news.