More Tulip Pictures

Just thought I'd share a few photos of the tulips from the last day or so as they have really opened up. Color #3 started opening today so by tomorrow I should be able to post a picture of that one. Tulip Festival starts 1 week from today!!! I'll have lots of pictures to post after that.

Tulip Color # 2...

Yesterday when Mom and Dad got home from town, Mom had a surprise for me. She had found potted tulips leftover from Easter on clearance at Wal-mart for $3! So this first picture of the yellow one is one of those. There were 6 or 7 bulbs in the pot so we divided them up and planted them alongside the others. The yellow really makes the purple ones stand out!



The picture below is the second tulip to bloom of the ones I bought in Holland last year. This variety is called Apeldoorn Elite and just started opening today. Now we're just waiting on the third variety to bloom. They look like candy and it's really hard to not want to pick them!

Impatiently Waiting....

I have a thing for tulips. Besides roses they are my favorite flower. So you can about imagine that I went crazy last year when I went to the Tulip Festival in Holland, Michigan. I bought 30 tulip bulbs, 10 each of 3 different varieties. They arrived in the mail last fall and Mom and I planted them in 3 different groups along the driveway and 1 group in front of the mailbox.

Since then I have been keeping a close eye on them hoping that we had planted them correctly and they were going to grow properly. I also was watching them closely since we are overrun with rabbits who love to munch on them! I bought some spray that is supposed to keep the rabbits and deer away from them and so far they have stayed away.

Since September I have been impatiently waiting and finally today I was rewarded with the first one of the tulips to open so far this spring! This is the Negrita variety. I'm anxious to see what the other two varieties look like.

Today in 1775

"Listen my children and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in seventy-five;

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year."

I remember hearing this poem as a kid and picturing it in my head. Who knows how or why we get mental pictures the way we do but I remember seeing it all play out in my head whenever I heard this poem. It was so surreal and yet very real all at the same time. There's something about this first verse that to this day still sends chills through me.

On the night of April 18, 1775, silversmith Paul Revere made his famous ride to Lexington, Massachusetts to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British were marching from Concord to Boston that night to arrest them and to seize military supplies.

Contrary to Longfellow's poem, lanterns were not hung in the tower of the Old North Church to signal to Revere how the British were moving, "one if by land, two if by sea"; but rather Paul Revere ordered the signal to warn other Patriots in the area.

After Revere reached Lexington, successfully warning Samuel Adams and John Hancock of the coming danger he got back on his horse and set our for Concord although he never made it. He was captured by the British along the way but a companion of his escaped and road on to Concord where he alerted the Patriots there. Paul Revere was later released by the British and he accomplished what he set out to do as word travelled from town to town warning the minutemen to be ready.

We need to be modern-day Paul Revere's. We are on the brink of losing the freedoms that these men and women risk their lives to give us. We need to be the watchmen on the walls, modern-day Patriots, ready to run with the warning when we see danger approaching. When I was in Boston in 2008 I was able to go to the Old North Church which is now in the Little Italy section of Boston. I went inside the church, sat in the pews and took the picture that you see here. I was also able to go to the Old Granary Burial Ground which is one of the oldest graveyards in Boston and it's where Paul Revere is buried. I kept pinching myself all day long thinking to myself how amazing it was that I was actually standing where these very things happened. They're not just pretty words out of a poem. These things actually happened. They are very real and as Americans they belong to us. The future of the nation was in their hands. Now it's in ours. It's time to ride.