Blooms are awesome; roots are more important

Spring has apparently decided to do more than stick its head in the door, and my yard is awash with color. Thanks to my botanical strategery, we'll have splashes of yellow, purple, pink and magenta for next few weeks before a wave of orange and different shades of yellow displaces the early bloomers.

The flowers are a diversion from the mangy lawn that one day will get serious attention, which I'm sure my neighbors will appreciate. But that's another story.

Most of the plants I have on purpose in my yard are perennials -- phlox and daffodils, hostas, black-eyed-Susans and day lilies, flowering ground cover and lamb's ears, hens and chickens, grape hyacinth, iris, bee balm -- which pop up every year without me having to do anything to them. I should have a ton of tulips but the damn squirrels have ferreted out just about every bulb I've ever planted.

The magnolia that came with the house and its sister tree next door provide different shades of pink and if my lilac ever blooms, it should be a huge pop of purple in front and back. When it's all in full bloom, it's kind of awesome.

I'm a huge fan of perennials because the more serious upfront costs have an endless and amazing ROI. Annuals are fun bits of different colors and petal shapes to mix in, but they're one-and-done kind of plants. They don't dig their roots in deep. They don't keep coming back to enrich and beautify your life just when you need them most even when you've kind of forgotten about them.

Good friends are like perennials. They're rooted deep. They're there even when you can't see them, don't think about them. Even if your level of care and feeding would shrivel less-hardy stock.
 
One case in point: Debbie Ellis Lubelski. Back in high school, she and I went together like peas and carrots as Forrest Gump would say.

We were country kids, so we spent a ton of time outdoors with horses and dirt bikes. We tore up the back roads in her little red Chevette. We were going to go to Purdue University together, get our degrees and work for National Geographic. I'd write and she'd take stunning photographs. We were going to travel the world.

In reality, I didn't get to Purdue, but life worked out fine for this Sycamore. Deb, however, graduated from Purdue, where she met and married a great guy (hence the Lubelski portion of her name.) They have two sons, and they both work at Purdue in science-y jobs I can't describe. David works in a clean room where you can kill yourself with chemicals if you're not careful. Debbie oversaw greenhouses and is about to go back into lab work. They're super smart and probably have done things that have made your life better or safer.

Aaron has graduated and lives out-of-state doing important research. Adam is finishing a nursing degree at Purdue. Other than an occasional visit over the years, Deb and I have kept in touch largely via Facebook despite not living that far apart. But when I messaged her to say Ali was interested in Purdue and ask if she would have any time at all for a personal tour of the place, she didn't hesitate.

Deb didn't just give us a tour; she wore the hell out of us.

We'd had a great group tour earlier in the month, which gave Alison a glimpse of some of the labs. The Lubelski tour went from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. or so, and we were in and out of places I bet some students don't even see -- certainly not as high school juniors.

And while it had been years since we'd seen each other, it didn't seem like decades had whizzed past us once we re-united. The last time I'd seen David, we decided, was at their wedding.

I'd been to Deb's baby shower for Aaron, her oldest, but I'd not met Adam at all. But it didn't seem to be an issue.  He met us for lunch and then stuck around to show us places he haunts on campus - places he thought Ali might want to know about if she goes to Purdue. He and Ali took off a couple of times on their own, leaving the old folks to catch up and rest weary knees.

At one point, another student was taking us to some chemistry labs and Adam was peeling off to go study. I remarked about how amazing it was that he was so willing to take so much time to trot us around. Debbie thought I was talking about the female grad student who was ahead of a few steps with Alison. She quietly corrected me on my pronoun choice.

"I meant Adam," I said, which set us off into a laughing fit that made me remember a time her mom was driving us to an away basketball game and someone (it was probably Debbie) said, "I got gave a pig."

Debbie's dad was a pig farmer, so it makes sense that a porcine transaction would have been a topic of conversation. It makes sense that she would have said but I don't remember  the details. Just that the sentence's grammatical incorrectness made us explode in laughter that must have driven her mother to the edge of insanity. You probably had to be there to get the joke, but my stomach still aches from laughing about it.

Which brings me to my actual point. In my garden of friends, Debbie is a perennial. How many friends you haven't seen in decades would take a day off work to cart around you and your kid around a college campus? And bring along her husband and kid because it was long past time that you got to know them? And whose spouses you've barely met would make time for you like that? I hope you have some because they're awesome.


It was an amazing day. We had department heads, grad students, undergrads, scientists who took time out of their day to show us around. We saw mass spectrometry and electron microscopes being used, a mice lab where the woman running it showed Ali how to inject DNA into embryos that would be implanted in mice as part of her research into killing tumors.

Another lab was working on super secrete defense stuff. We were in a greenhouse with a guy who is trying to figure out how to keep e. coli out of our salad bowls. We were about done when someone mentioned electron microscopes and Deb said, "You want to see some?"

"Uh, yeah," Ali said as if it was crazy to think she wouldn't.

So we popped into another building where a woman thought for a second about who was doing what with the equipment in that area. She walked us back to an area where two guys were using one of the microscopes. These aren't the desk top microscopes you may remember from high school. They each have their own room and they kind of reminded me of a submarine periscope. They're huge and they give you an atomic-level view of whatever it is you're examining.
 
Our guide decided that the first viewpoint wasn't good enough, so she grabbed a tissue sample and gave Ali a closer look at it using a different electron microscope in a room across the way.

Ali geeked out and talked science with more people than we will remember. Many of them offered up their contact information if she wanted to stay in touch. On the way home, I said something to Ali about how fun it was for me to watch her talk science with these folks who are conducting what could be truly life-changing research.

"I was glad I could hold a conversation," she said. "It was super cool."

It was super cool, and made possible only because of the generosity of my old friend and the favors she and her husband called in from their network of friends at Purdue. So if their credentials aren't enough for you, there's that.
 
Oh. I said Deb wore the hell out of us. Here's my evidence. When we got back in the car to go home, Ali curled up and was dozing before we got off campus. I woke her up a few minutes later when I stopped to get gas and a Red Bull, without which neither the Mustang nor I would have made it home.

I'm fortunate to have met friends like Debbie everywhere I've been. The grape hyacinth in my yard came from my friend Cindy Athey's yard. Every year when it pops up, I think about her and wish we saw each other every day like we used to. I have peonies out back that my former neighbor wanted me to transfer so she can some visit them one day. My day lilies and irises are from back home.


The great thing about friends and perennial flowers is they don't have to always be in bloom to be part of your root system.