In the spirit of celebrating April as Poetry Month, I chose a prose poem by a member of The Writing Sisters, Joanne Peterson. “Tulip Fields, Revisited” is from our anthology, Writing in Place: Prose & Poetry from the Pacific Northwest.

Joanne’s gift of attention to detail draws me immediately into her story. Her vivid and concise descriptions allow me to seamlessly shift from her present to past memories. As clearly as I could imagine Joanne driving back to see the fields, I can envision her stepping in her dad’s footprints as they planted bulb after bulb “… with crisp onion-like skins, pointed end upward to pierce the earth in spring.”

Words can be a time machine, so one need only to read this prose poem to visit the Tulip Fields again and again.

Tulip Fields, Revisited

This quiet early spring day, she drives familiar narrow roads, past farmlands she knew as a child. Each fall she walked behind her father and his brothers in the fields. They set tulip bulbs in long trenches, bulbs with crisp onion-like skins, pointed end upward to pierce the earth in the spring. She would clump along in the last set of big footprints, stepping into the earthy tread marks just enough paces behind not to be a bother. Every few years, grown now, a city dweller, she makes the trip back to the acres of bulb farms. Once she knew each family on the rural routes of the mailman and the school bus. She knew the path along the edge of the field where sometimes a family of foxes hurried toward the woods beyond the roadway. The bulb fields remain, though gradually they seem to her less like farms and more like Hollywood. Bold commercial signs mark intersections, calling out to spring tourists: Dutch Tulips: 47 Varieties! Tourist Coaches Welcome! We Ship Free! Petting Zoo! Hand-Dipped Ice Cream! She hates the signs. When she was a child, there were no spring tourists. She and her sister set a card table by the road in pale April sunlight and displayed tulips in old fruit jars. She remembers their messy hand-lettered sign: 50 Cents a Bunch. Hardly anybody stopped—they had tulips of their own. Now, she slowly drives the old roads past fields barely sprouting. Two years ago, she came here in January, pulled by a keen longing for fields covered with white snow geese. Masses of the stunning creatures covered the brown earth, visiting amongst themselves until—coming to some sort of agreement—they swept into the sky, thunderous wings, jubilant voices. Watching their flight—the freedom of it!—she could scarcely breathe. That day she leaned against her car, round-eyed as the child she used to be, pinned by beauty, feeling the air move, feeling her hair blow across her face as the geese billowed over her. Today a lone hawk occupies a fencepost near her old home as she cruises past for her ritual look at the property. A green John Deere tractor sits in the familiar driveway, a man in a blue baseball cap tinkering with the engine. The same old rhododendron bushes crowd the front porch. The house needs painting—but then, it always did. She sighs, wondering why she keeps coming back. Slowly, slowly, she drives by the last familiar rectangle of what used to be her father’s tulip fields. I’m not coming here anymore, she decides. It’s too hard. And then, along the edge of the familiar property, a burst of color, a swift movement. She stops the car. A small red fox trots along in the weedy ditch, near where she and her sister sold tulips, 50 Cents a Bunch.

— Joanne Peterson

Joanne Bradbury Peterson, born in Yakima, Washington, moved with her family to Edmonds at age seven and with her brother Warren (Warren passed in May 2021) enjoyed a carefree Edmonds childhood. She graduated from Edmonds High School and earned a BA in English from Washington State University. As an adult, she moved east of the Cascades for more than 40 years. Still charmed by Edmonds, she moved back to her hometown. She wrote a column called “Home Again” for the Edmonds Beacon for many years.

Joanne has won numerous awards for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from Edmonds Write on the Sound conferences, Edmonds EPIC Writers, Shoreline Arts Council, and the National League of American Pen Women, San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Between the Lines, an Edmonds Community College literary publication.

Enjoying a variety of occupations, she has been a junior high teacher, stay-at-home mom, Head Start parent program coordinator, cherry picker, pregnancy and adoption counselor, library support staff worker, and community college tutoring center coordinator. She impulsively chose early retirement to go trekking in Nepal, a decision she has never regretted. A mission trip to Kenya was equally rewarding.