Tulips; Yellow and Purple

Yesterday I bought some purple and yellow tulips. I had just taken a shower so my hair was half wet and half frizzy, and I was wearing my token OU Football T shirt (went to one game in 4 years, ladies and gentlemen, but darn it all if I don't love that shirt) and my gray gym shorts with the paint stain on them from the Great Funeral Home Paint of 2007. (Aaron and I took all odd jobs that summer, together. We painted, we camp counseled. We watched movies in my basement. It was glorious.)

Anyway, my point is that when I bought the flowers I didn't look like a person who would be buying flowers at a grocery store. At Lowe's, maybe. Because you could've assumed that I was doing housework in my grub clothes and the flowers fit into that. But I wasn't at Lowe's, I was at Basha's, where the flowers are way overpriced and where the home-owners certainly do not go on home improvement shopping sprees.

And the flowers were most definitely overpriced. I paid like, $7.99 for each color. One bushel of purple, one of yellow. That's like, almost $15, man. (Full disclosure: there was a giant pause in my typing before I got that number out. I haven't taken a math class since 2005, so it's ok.)

I hadn't planned to buy them. They weren't on my neat, yellow, college-ruled list. The other thing about the flowers was that I didn't really have a purpose for them in mind, other than putting them in my little purple vase and in the center of my clutter-filled kitchen table. Also regarding live flowers: they don't live forever. You have to have these things in mind when you are shelling out $15 on something. Especially when $15 could also go toward dog food, or laundry detergent, or Chipotle.

The best part about all of this is, though, that I bought the flowers. I had one millisecond of "oh, I shouldn't" but I took that thought captive, ya'll. And Aaron didn't even blink a beautiful eye of his. He looked at them and said "Oh Ria, how beautiful!" and when I said "they're kind of expensive" he looked at me like I was speaking a different language, and we just paid for them at the register.

This Easter morning when I got up, the tulip blooms had started to open up, and the swirl of purple and yellow that I saw out of my still-sleeping eyes was just so sweet and sugary. I went out on my porch with my mug of orange juice. (Orange juice is my coffee, but I still pretend it's real coffee.) And I sat and stared at this gorgeous sunrise, and I read the resurrection story in Luke and John, and I thought about my Aunt Cris, and I realized that buying flowers is a little thing, but if in doing so you can stomp on a little tiny fraction of the larger-than-life swarm of useless anxiety that we allow to surround ourselves every single minute, well, then that is really something. It is like a little bit of Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter that's all your own. And that was only made possible by the real Easter.

My weird, anti-intellectual, but ever-present anxiety died in a moment, and then a sweet, flower-smelled peace resurrected that couldn't have otherwise. And the victory is delicious.

Happy Easter!