Free Sisterchicks in Wooden Shoes! by Robin Jones Gunn

ruffle-edged tulip. I’m sure my expression when I looked up was one of childlike awe. I felt like a child experiencing one of the simple wonders of the world for the first time. I had seen tulips, but never had I imagined a tulip like this, with such intricacies.
    And that was only my first tulip.

I looked up from the singularly amazing ruffled bloom that had so captured my attention and once again felt the sense of being afloat on a lake of tulips. Such vivid colors! The sunlight highlighted the blooms so all the colors were sharply focused. For one heart-tugging, breathtaking moment, I closed my eyes. It seemed impossible to take in so much glory all at once.
    With a broad, sweeping gesture, a cool breeze brushed past us and moved through the tulips like an invisible hand rustling them from an enchanted sleep.
    “Look!” My voice was just above a whisper. “They’re dancing!”
    Noelle grinned and made soft agreeing sounds. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I love coming here. Do you want to walk around now and see some more? My favorite ones are over this way. Come.”
    I followed her the way a child wades into the water, feeling safe because a protective hand is within reach. In my mind’s eye I wasn’t envisioning Noelle’s hand being in reach; I was picturing God’s. Surely His hand was the invisible one that had just brushed over the sleepy heads of the tulips and sent shivers down theirstems and mine. I wondered if He loved seeing His children delight in the sight of such beauty. Did moments like this thrill Him the way they thrilled His children?
    “I came here last week,” Noelle said, breaking into my moment of contemplation. “I brought a woman who recently started coming to our church. Her family doesn’t yet know that she’s attending church, but she never had toured the tulip fields in the seven years she’s lived here. I offered to bring her, and when I went to pick her up, her mother and grandmother came as well. Her grandmother especially loved the tulip fields. Even though it rained, we still trekked up and down all the rows.”
    “I see now why you said that wooden shoes come in handy here.”
    “Yes. Now you see. This is a good place for wooden shoes. I should have brought mine last week. Today it’s not so muddy.”
    As we talked, we strolled past a lovely lineup of petite yellow tulips. We were nearing the center of the field, making our way to Noelle’s favorites—the deep red ones—when she said, “Look up.”
    I drew my fixed gaze from the endless line of tulips and glanced back to the parking area. There, far to the left, was a sight that had been hidden from our view by a dense grove of trees.
    “A windmill!”
    “There you go. Your first windmill. We only have a few hundred left in the country that still work. I don’t think that’s a working one.”
    “Not to sound like a foreigner or anything, but what do windmills do exactly? I mean, I’m guessing they are a source of energy—”
    “Nonpolluting, natural energy,” Noelle interjected.
    “Yes, but for what? Grinding grain or something?”
    “Yes. When thousands of windmills were here in the lowlands, the wind, of course, turned the sails and ground the grain. But they still are being used to distribute water and drain the polders. We have lots of water issues here, you know. Lots of canals. At Kinderdijk near Rotterdam, if we go up there, I’ll show you some windmills that still are working to keep the floodwaters back.”
    “So it wasn’t the little boy who stuck his finger in the dike that saved Holland from the ocean? It was really the windmills that saved the day?”
    “I have no doubt the legend of the little boy contains some truth, but, yes, the real heroes are windmills,” Noelle said. “Much of the Netherlands is below sea level.”
    “Like New Orleans.”
    “Yes. And we all saw what happened there when the waters weren’t held back.”
    “I never realized the Netherlands was so