Little flowers

Kytičky

I walk slowly through the garden, with the quiet consent of the flowers. As if each step gently stirred the memory.

The first to bloom are the snowflakes – delicate white lanterns unafraid of frost. They’re still holding hands with the snow, which helps them shine.

Then come the daffodils – the first golden messengers of spring sunshine, announcing that winter has truly lost its power.

And only when spring gains confidence do the red tulips appear – like a beauty who can afford to keep others waiting. Rich, velvety, like glowing embers. Beside them, the variegated ones – yellow and red, cheerful, sunlit. We know them all by heart. Not just their colours – but the story that grew alongside them.

Long ago, my father was checking a truck from Holland. He was given a few tulip bulbs. He brought them home and planted them. And they sprouted gratefully. The beginning of a whole lineage of flowers that spread across the garden beds like children.

My mother loved them. In May, she would pick them by the bucketful – simple, chipped buckets – and with my father she would carry them to the church. For the Marian devotions. To the pews, to the altar, beneath the statue of the Virgin Mary. The tulips stood there in silence, as if they too understood whom they were serving.

In June come the peonies. Large, opulent, with a scent like no other.

When they bloomed, it was a sign: the pilgrimage to Saint John the Baptist was near. My mother would prepare the chapel. Carefully, tenderly. The peonies were always the foundation – pink, white, crimson. She put everything into it – and said nothing. And only much later did we realise that it was more than just a task.

Whenever I watched her, it always seemed to me that all the light of the day gathered around her. Not sunlight – but some other kind of light.

Now I stand here. The tulips have faded, but the peonies are just the same as they were forty years ago. And when I walk among them, it feels like a voice that can no longer be heard, and a caress without hands.

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