I have thought about her every tulip time morning since. Dot has framed a small note I wrote about her on the porch that night. The note hangs in the workshop above my bench. The note reads only the phrase the widow had used. An honest grower.
Some sentences need no decoration. I sit on the back porch in the evenings now with a cup of coffee and the old farm dog Otis at my feet. A 14-year-old yellow lab my mother had brought home as a puppy in 2012. And I look out across the 8 acres of cut flowers in their early summer bloom. The peonies are finishing their second flush.
The dahlias are setting bud. The Christmas trees on the back 6 acres are 6 in taller than they were last year. The original 1925 well casing is the same 6-inch galvanized pipe my grandfather set with his brother and a steam powered rig 100 years ago. The aquifer below it has not lowered measurably in any year of those hundred. The flow rate through my main trunk line is exactly what the meter is rated for.
There is no longer an unauthorized branch. There has not been one since the 5th of May. Dot has written a children's book this summer. The working title is The Bluest Tulips. The book is about a small Dutch boy in a Dutch town who notices something strange in his neighbor's garden.
The boy figures out what is happening. The boy and his grandfather tell the truth. The book is illustrated by a young Pella artist named Shuka Kulvvic, who is Pim's older sister and who is in real life 23 and on her way to graduate school at the University of Iowa. The book will be published by the Iowa Children's Press in the spring. All proceeds go to the Iowa Watershed Trust.
The first signing is scheduled at the Pella Public Library on the Saturday of Tulip Time next year. Helen Vosan is helping plan it. Dot is helping write the dedication. The dedication as currently drafted reads in part for the children who will one day inherit our wells and who will one day defend them. The Brinkmeyer Farm Honest Garden Tour has become an annual event.
The third Saturday of every tulip time, we open the farm from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Last year, we hosted 2,200 visitors. The proceeds, $21,400, went to the Iowa Watershed Trust, the Pella Public Library, and the new Merritt Beamster Memorial Garden Education Fund at the Pella Garden Club. Merritt had passed in February at age 79. She had asked in her final weeks that any memorial contributions be directed to a fund teaching honest growing practices to Iowa children.