Is Your Soul Starving? Buy Hyacinths.

I was twenty-five in 1975 and deeply, deeply depressed.

I was in graduate school. A mother of two young boys, one a toddler. Trapped in a marriage to a basically decent guy with whom I had nothing in common and no hope of it ever being better. A practicing Catholic, I had consulted with priests who told me, essentially, to suck it up and quit being selfish at the risk of eternal damnation. That made me feel so much better.

One afternoon, I sat hemming a dress for an internship interview and I stabbed myself with a needle. I watched the blood well up. I felt nothing. I hadn’t felt anything except bleak and dead for a long time.

I made a plan.

I would take my little green Toyota Corolla out late at night to the far reaches between Dallas and Fort Worth, where a new highway was being built. I would get the car up to speed and drive it off the unfinished roadway onto the deserted highway far below.

I figured that would do it. A fiery crash. Twisted metal. Release. An end to what I saw as a life without hope. No traffic, so I wouldn’t hurt anyone else.

It’s a longer story than this one, but I ended up in the office of Dr. Jacobs, a lovely old Jewish GP who had known my husband and his family for two generations.

I broke down. Sat in his office and cried for hours and he let me.

He listened. Then he told me:

“Divorce your husband. It just isn’t enough for you. You need more.”

Then he told me about roses.

“Roses have thorns to protect themselves. But roses are also beautiful. They have a beautiful fragrance. And,” he concluded, “roses grow best out of shit. Be a rose.”

He did not charge me for his time or the advice.

I got it. My thorns were all those things about me that others found difficult. I was learning to be assertive. I was often angry—with the world, with my family, with the lot of women. My thorns protected me.

I left his office and went downstairs to the hospital gift shop. I needed to pull myself together before I picked up my boys from daycare and took them home.

I wandered around looking at greeting cards.

One caught my eye. Nothing fancy. Manila-colored cardstock with a simple flower illustration on the front.

I opened it.

Inside were words I had never seen before:

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,

And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,

Sell one, and with the dole

Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

—attributed to Saadi, 13th century Persian poet.

I bought the card. I went to the grocery store. I bought the cheapest hot dogs I could find. A can of pork and beans. A can of green peas. Some really cheap cookies.

I picked up my boys.

That night, for dinner, we ate the cookies first.

The next day, I passed a flower shop. I had about five dollars left to get us through the end of the month.

With almost nothing left, I bought myself a small potted purple hyacinth.

I can still remember its fragrance. Sweet. Almost impossibly sweet. Unforgettable.

I recited the words on the card to myself. I never wanted to forget them. For many years, the card moved with me from one apartment refrigerator to the next.

Over the past fifty years, I have bought a lot of hyacinths.

Sometimes they have actually been flowers.

Sometimes they have been books. Paint. Music. Travel. A beautiful meal. A ridiculous indulgence I could probably have done without.

But I don’t think of them as indulgences anymore.

Flowers, though, have always had a particular hold on me. I’ve written about that before, too.

There are times when bread keeps the body alive.

And there are times when you damn well better buy the hyacinths.