Tiptoe Through the Tulips

Melody walked through her garden very slowly and carefully that day. For reasons that she knew only too well, it was absolutely necessary for her to tiptoe through the tulips at this moment. The explanation is a long, and occasionally complicated story. Here it is.

In her teenage years Melody had become a flower child, a hippie. Her given name was Priscilla, which she changed when she turned 16. At 18 she literally charmed the pants off of a very successful businessman in his mid-thirties.  She wasn’t attracted by his money. The way she explained it to her parents was that he “gave off vibes of being a kind soul.” They married a few months after they met, even though she said that they did not have to follow that ‘conventional path’. She never had to get a job. She dedicated herself to several worthy causes, and their two children, who were worthy in their own right.. This didn’t mean that she was completely selfless. For the first years of their marriage she earned a degree in botany. It fed the hunger of her interest and added scientific content to her intuition with plants, particularly flowers. 

Life was good for Melody. Her marriage ran smoothly. Her children grew up successful and happy, with a well-cultivated distrust for conventional thinking. But then came the big change. Phillip died in a plane craft – his own – when he was 60 years old. The kids had just weeks earlier moved to California, the other side of the continent, to get jobs in Silicon valley. Melody did not have to work, but she needed something to occupy a mind both needing activity and relentlessly curious. The flowers that she had always loved would come to fill those needs.

But she couldn’t have just any flower garden. She had to breed her own variety of her favourite flower – tulips. And she wanted them to shine like no other tulips had ever done before. They had to be special. She wanted them to be a luminescent purple, kind of like the colour her daughter Rose had dyed her hair when she was 16. After some experimentation, trial and error, she found that she could breed tulips with that colour if she took some genes from a belladonna (otherwise known as deadly nightshade), whose flowers were usually described as a ‘dull purple’. She knew a bit about belladonna from some stoner friends of her teenage years who had risked their lives (fortunately no one dying) taking it as a recreational drug.

The first few experiments didn’t produce the shade of purple, or the shiny look that she wanted, so she upped the DNA dose of the belladonna. It worked.  As they grew and she looked up and down the rows, she saw exactly the colour that she had wanted, what she was calling Priscilla Purple.  Maybe she could publish her work developing these tulips, perhaps not in an academic paper, but maybe in one of the better gardening magazines.

 But there was much more to what those tulips produced than what she would have imagined. She wanted to view them all more closely, so one day she walked down through the narrow distance between rows. Melody’s legs lightly grazed the tulips on both sides of her as she passed by them. When they did, a light dusty almost misty substance arose from the flowers When she breathed it in, she started to cough, and feel a little dizzy. She walked more slowly the rest of the way, staggering and stumbling a bit, and generally having a hard time making it to the end of the row. She had produced a floral Frankenstein, a monster. From that day on she watered those tulips from a distance, downwind from where she stood with the hose. And she never walked between the rows.

           To protect birds and other animals from straying too near the dangerous flowers, she created a scarecrow that was modelled after Tiny Tim, the ukulele-playing long-haired musician who became famous for singing Tiptoe Through the Tulips, and named one of his daughters ‘Tulip.’ To keep humans away she put up a several large signs, “Warning – These Tulips Are Dangerous to Your Health. Keep Away.”

The Stalker

Melody had continued to be involved with several charities. Recently, she organized and richly contributed to a fundraiser party to help exploited agricultural workers. She was a genial hostess, too much so as it turned out. She danced with a number of different men, visibly enjoying herself in the faster dances, as she could let herself go. One of her dance partners didn’t care too much for the cause, but had seen an article on Melody, and had decided to try to worm his charming way into a relationship with the rich and beautiful widow. He misinterpreted her smiles while dancing with him as her actually enjoying his company, and wanting to spend the night with him. When he made a rather obvious physical come on during the slow dance that followed, she way too gently pushed him away before the song was over. They did not dance again that night. 

But this did not discourage him like it should have. He knew where she lived. Pretty much everyone in town did. The mansion she lived in, and her expansive, beautiful garden were both well-known from pictures in the gardening section of the local paper.

In his perverse thinking, all he had to do was hold her in his arms and come on to her again, and she would not be able to resist him. After all, she had only pushed him away lightly. Maybe she was just a little shy. That must be it.

An Encounter in the Flower Garden

He planned a way to get her back in his arms again.  One night, he pitched a small tent in the thickly treed public woods that stood behind her property.  His plan was to walk out of the woods the next morning and ‘purely by chance’ encounter her in her garden. He would tell Melody that when he left the woods he saw her garden and was instantly impressed. He would say to her that he had heard of all the work that she had put into growing it, but was not properly prepared for the dramatic effect it had on him. He would then rachet up his charm.  She would not be able to resist him. 

He rose with the sun, and waited at forest edge for her to come out to her garden. It was barely light when he saw her. He walked boldly towards her, picking up speed as he approached her garden. She knew this to be the threatening situation it was. And she would not be able to outrun him, should it come to that. Then she had an idea.

She proceeded down one of the rows of the Priscilla Purples. She knew that she would have to walk very carefully and very slowly. She would have to tiptoe through the tulips.

           When her stalker saw this, he grinned. This would be easy. He would catch her, hold her in his arms, whisper some of the right words that he had practiced on others and in front of the mirror. She would be charmed. He strode aggressively through the flowers, his left leg brushing against some of the tulips on the edge of the row. He was confident that he would soon catch her. Then he felt a wave of dizziness, and before he knew it, he crashed to the ground.

           She called 911, with both the police and the ambulance arriving quickly. Fortunately for him, the stalker survived, but with a newly-acquired fear of tulips. The confrontation made the local paper with the front page headline “Woman Avoids Trouble When She Tip Toes Through the Tulips.”