Sisterchicks in Wooden Shoes! (6 page)

“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.”

“I’m still amazed at how straight all the rows are.”

“That’s Dutch precision for you.”

“This morning I read from the devotional book you left by my bed. The prayer for today had a last line with something about
‘let our ordered lives demonstrate Your beauty and peace.’ I don’t remember the words exactly, but I was thinking of that while looking up and down all these rows. An ordered row or an ordered life really does demonstrate beauty and peace, doesn’t it?”

“My father-in-law would like what you just said. He has a farm.” Noelle bent down to look closer at a wide-open pink tulip. The flower seemed to snuggle to her touch the way a dog relaxes when scratched behind the ears. “When I first came here, I couldn’t believe how hard my father-in-law worked and how detailed he was about everything he did. He was the king of orderly rows of crops and an orderly routine to his life. He was successful in a very quiet, unnoticed way and well respected for his criticism.”

“Did you say for his criticism?”

“Yes. His critical comments were highly valued. Individuals took what he said about them or their work with great appreciation. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? This was one of the most difficult parts of the culture for me to adjust to because I’m so big on praise and affirmation. I’m still not sure I fully understand it.”

“Are you saying that a critical comment is more highly valued than a compliment?”

“Something like that. Here, when a person hands out praise and compliments left and right, he is considered a flatterer and insincere. More than that, he is seen as… What’s the term? Simpleminded?”

“An airhead?”

“An airhead.” Noelle laughed. “I hadn’t heard that term
before. That’s good. That’s what a person who compliments a lot would be considered. On the other hand, a person who offers constructive criticism is considered caring and smart. That individual tells it like it is, which reflects more thought and intelligence.”

“I would have a hard time adjusting to that way of thinking.”

“I did at first. Now I have settled into a sort of hybrid of Dutch thought and American ways. I still hand out far too many compliments and praises, according to my husband, although I have had some influence on him. You saw how complimentary he was of you at dinner last night.”

I nodded.

“I’m also still too loud and expressive to be mistaken for a true, hundred percent Dutch woman. Jelle says you can take the girl out of the USA, but you can’t take the USA out of the girl.”

“I don’t see that as a bad thing.”

“Neither do I.” With a sly grin Noelle added, “This is one of the reasons your visit is so good for me. It gives me a chance to be my good ol’ US of A self around someone who understands.”

“You can be as US of A around me as you want.” We were heading toward the gift shop, so I added, “If by any chance they carry American flags in the gift shop, I’ll buy one for you.”

Noelle laughed. “I doubt you’ll find any. But if we find some wooden shoes, I will buy those for you.”

We entered the gift shop and found wooden shoes, all right. Every size and color. We found key rings with tiny wooden shoes dangling from the end, wooden-shoe planters for flowers, and wooden-shoe Christmas ornaments.

The swarm of visitors had increased in number and nationality, it seemed, since we first had arrived. The gift shop felt unbearably crowded.

Noelle selected a big bouquet of mixed colored tulips and was standing in line at the checkout. I opted for buying an ornament for my Christmas tree.

Noelle insisted on purchasing the ornament along with a second one she had picked out for me. My selection was a hand-painted, cutout ornament of a red tulip. Noelle’s choice for me was a pair of yellow wooden shoes dangling from a long black ribbon.

“They look like ballet slippers hanging from their satin laces.” I held them up and watched the wooden shoes sway like wind chimes.

“Well, you saw how the breeze made the tulips dance. You can just consider wooden shoes to be the Dutch dancing shoes, if you want to go sway with the tulips.”

I loved both of the winsome reminders of our fun day together. More than likely I wouldn’t tuck the ornaments away and wait until Christmas to hang them on the tree. I would find a special place at home, like the swing arm of the lamp behind the couch or the corner of my bathroom mirror. That’s where I would hang the little hand-painted charmers.

Every time I looked at them I would remember this morning—the morning Noelle and I went bobbing on a lake of dancing tulips. If I ever doubted that any of this spectacular day really happened, I would have hundreds of pictures as evidence, red-hot mamas and all.