Lisse, The Netherlands
Spring · Apr 2022
A little red tulip, quietly standing among a sea of yellow.
The farmer later confirmed that it really was a mistake — one red bulb somehow making its way into a field meant to be entirely yellow. I imagine it must have been easy to overlook when everything was being planted. By the time the flowers bloomed, there it was, a single splash of red in an otherwise perfect stretch of yellow.
And yet, standing there, it was very naturally the one I noticed first. There was something rather lovely about that unexpected interruption. It broke the uniformity of the field without taking anything away from it. In fact, the red tulip somehow made all that yellow around it even more vivid.
Maybe mistakes aren’t always meant to be fixed. Sometimes they simply become part of the picture, and perhaps even make the whole thing a little more interesting.
Like us, perhaps — occasionally out of place, not quite as planned, but somehow belonging after all.
