I’ve finally gotten around to reading a novel that has been on my book list since first beholding a Looney Tunes episode that ended with Bugs Bunny, the ultimate NYC wiseacre, fending off a pack of dogs with a book bearing the title, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I remember feeling rather proud of myself when I made the comic connection. This was before I had my first dog, after which the literary allusion became a lot more obvious.

Betty Smith’s novel about the struggles of an immigrant family in early 20th Century Brooklyn, New York was a bestseller when it was published during the Second World War, and within a few years it was adapted to the big screen with the help of renowned motion picture director Elia Kazan.

If you are wondering at this point just where I’m going with this, there is a scene in the book that involves tulips. In this scene, the main character, Frances Nolan (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is essentially a coming of age story), and her brother Neely are up on the roof of their tenement building gazing at the stars on New Year’s night, 1917. There are some big changes just up ahead for the Nolans and their adopted country.

Francie, as she is called, is about to turn 16 and already has a full-time job at a New York clipping service. Her younger brother confides in her that he once drank two bottles of beer with a friend and “the whole world turned upside down.” Francie responds that she too has been drunk, and when Neely asks if it was also due to drinking beer, the following exchange takes place.

“No. Last spring, in McCarren’s Park, I saw a tulip for the first time in my life.”

“How’d you know it was a tulip if you’d never seen one?”

“I’d seen pictures. Well, when I looked at it, the way it was growing, and how the leaves were, and how purely red the petals were, with yellow inside, the world turned upside down and everything went around like the colors in a kaleidoscope — like you said. I was so dizzy I had to sit on a park bench.”

I have to admit, without the slightest bit of embarrassment, that I know where Francie is coming from. I heart you, sister. Every time I gaze upon a tulip, not to mention entire fields of them stretching to a horizon framed by the purple mountains majesty of the Cascades, it kind of takes my breath away.

Having confessed this, you can appreciate why I look forward to the prospect of continuing to view tulips even as we approach Mother’s Day, 2023 — hopefully, with less tulip traffic, but at least with warmer temperatures than when the annual Tulip Festival began in what turned out to be the fourth month of winter in the Magic Skagit.

To celebrate the floral event that makes the Skagit Valley an international destination venue each spring, I thought I’d go back to some tulip themed “Tales of the Magic Skagit” episodes from the past — a literary tip-toe through the tulips, if you will.

It started, appropriately enough, with a story about the “Mother of the Skagit Valley’s bulb industry,” Mary Stewart, who journeyed to the Skagit Valley from Ohio along with her husband William. Settling on 40 acres of Samish Island, she was the first person in the Magic Skagit to import tulips from Holland, and is credited with starting Skagit County’s bulb industry. No lie.

We published a story about a tulip poster artist whose iconic homage to the Magic Skagit was inspired by a golden Cascade moonrise over a field of tulips. We also took up the tale of a Mount Vernon landmark, the highly visible Tulip Tower, and its significance to the history of Skagit Valley’s farm economy.

Finally, we devoted a couple of lighthearted historical essays to the darker side of the Magic Skagit’s famous bloom: the role that tulips played in the take down of a Turkish sultan and the near destruction of the Dutch economy. Truth is, after all, stranger than fiction. And just to help ease us through the inevitable sorrow of the last falling tulip petal, we devoted an episode to some magnificent local rhododendrons on Mount Vernon’s Cleveland Street.

As always, friends of Meyer Sign and “Tales of the Magic Skagit,” thanks for being such a wonderful audience. We always appreciate your responses to our stories, as well as your dedication to keeping the magic happening in so many ways. We’re darn lucky to live where we do, as our annual bacchanalia of blooms reminds us, however much we may grumble at the traffic. If Francie Nolan could be inspired by a single tulip in the midst of early 20th century New York City, us Skagitonians would be truly ungrateful not to feel the same sense of awe and wonder every spring. I sure do.