In the weeks between Casper's plea and Berkeley's, the Windmill Crossing Estates HOA reorganized itself. A retired Pella schoolteacher named Saskia Vermeer—Theron's older sister, the one who had declined the presidency in 2020—accepted the interim presidency on the 29th of May. She walked the development door-to-door for nine days in early June with a clipboard, listening to each household's concerns and explaining what the new board would do differently. She was sixty-eight. She had taught at Pella Elementary School for 33 years. She had her father's careful Dutch demeanor and her mother's quiet, stubborn streak.
Within three weeks, Saskia had restructured the HOA bookkeeping under independent third-party review, eliminated the executive director role Berkeley had created for herself, and instituted a quarterly open-records review for any homeowner who wanted to walk in and read the books. The Windmill Crossing residents who had voted Berkeley in voted Saskia in formally on the 17th of July by a count of 35 to 2. The two were Berkeley's adjacent neighbors, who had voted no on principle because Saskia was Theron's sister and Theron was, in their view, too friendly with the farmer.
Saskia drove to my farm the day after the vote with a casserole and Theron in the passenger seat. She sat at my kitchen table for two hours. She apologized for the HOA's three-year complicity in silence. She and Dorothea have been close friends since.
Berkeley took a guilty plea on the 18th of July: four years in Iowa state custody, three years probation, and restitution of $217,000—the stolen water value calculated at three times the municipal rate (a treble damages award under Iowa's civil theft statute), the HOA embezzlement, the investigation costs, my dye and salt costs, and my attorney's fees. She received a permanent ban from serving on any Iowa community board and a permanent ban from competing at Pella Tulip Time. She reported to the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in Mitchellville on the 2nd of September. She has not made a public statement since the plea hearing.
The Pella Garden Club expelled Berkeley by unanimous vote on the 8th of June. The Tulip Time Committee revoked her three prior Grand Champion ribbons in a public ceremony on the 15th of June. The 2021, 2022, and 2023 ribbons were taken down from the wall of honor at the Pella Historical Village Museum and replaced with a single small placard reading: Withdrawn by Disqualification.
The committee, in an internal investigation that ran through July, determined that Berkeley's three prior Grand Champion displays had all benefited from the same stolen water. The committee did not reassign the prior ribbons; they simply marked them void.
The Pella Historical Village curator, a 41-year-old Dutch woman named Anke Vermeer—Theron's wife—gave me a small bronze pin at a quiet ceremony the second weekend of June. The pin was the pin the committee gave to its founding members in 1935. Anke told me when she pinned it to my work jacket: "Edmund, Pella has wanted to give you this since 2021. We just didn't know."
The Brinkmeer farm became, by the Saturday of Tulip Time, an alternate destination on the festival's official tour bus route. The Pella Tulip Time Committee voted on the Tuesday of the festival week to redirect three of the four scheduled afternoon bus tours to my farm for an "Honest Iowa Cut Flower Demonstration." I had not requested the redirect. The committee chair, a retired Pella public school principal named Marrit Beemster, had personally driven to my farm on Tuesday morning to ask. I had said yes on the condition that we donate all proceeds from the redirected tours to the Iowa Watershed Trust and the Pella Public Library children's program. She had agreed.
The tours ran Saturday through Sunday. We hosted, across the two days, 1,140 visitors. The peony field was at peak bloom. Dot ran the visitor center out of the workshop with three of her old library colleagues. Freddy gave a 40-minute presentation on water rights law at 3:00 p.m. each day to standing-room crowds in the equipment barn. Antje sold lemonade for 50 cents a cup; she made $46 in two days. She has been saving for a pony she will not be allowed to keep until she is seven.
The Iowa Watershed Trust received a check from the Brinkmeer Farm for $11,460 on the Wednesday after Tulip Time. The Pella Public Library children's program received an equal amount. Dot delivered the library check in person to her former colleague, Helen Vossen—Dr. Annika Vossen's mother, another Pella coincidence of surnames—at the library's weekly story hour. Helen cried; Dot cried. The children in the story hour applauded, because four-year-olds applaud whatever the adults are doing.
A particular small kindness happened the Saturday of the Tulip Time bus tours that I want to describe. A retired widow from Cedar Rapids, a woman of about seventy-five who had ridden the bus alone on the 11:00 tour, stopped me at the cut flower demonstration table. She had not bought anything. She had not asked any questions. She had simply waited until the demonstration was over and the bus was loading.
She had walked up to me. She had taken both my hands. She had said, "Mr. Brinkmeer, my husband died last March. He had been growing tulips for sixty-one years. He never won a single ribbon. He never wanted one. He just wanted the tulips. Thank you for reminding me what an honest grower looks like."
She had walked away before I could answer. She had gotten back on the bus. I have not seen her since; I have thought about her every Tulip Time morning since. Dot has framed a small note I wrote about her on the porch that night. The note hangs in the workshop above my bench. The note reads only the phrase the widow had used: An honest grower. Some sentences need no decoration.
I sit on the back porch in the evenings now with a cup of coffee and the old farm dog, Otis, at my feet—a 14-year-old yellow lab my mother had brought home as a puppy in 2012. And I look out across the eight acres of cut flowers in their early summer bloom: the peonies are finishing their second flush, the dahlias are setting bud, the Christmas trees on the back six acres are six inches taller than they were last year.
The original 1925 well casing is the same 6-inch galvanized pipe my grandfather set with his brother and a steam-powered rig a hundred years ago. The aquifer below it has not lowered measurably in any year of those hundred. The flow rate through my main trunk line is exactly what the meter is rated for. There is no longer an unauthorized branch; there has not been one since the 5th of May.
Dot has written a children's book this summer; the working title is The Bluest Tulips. The book is about a small Dutch boy in a Dutch town who notices something strange in his neighbor's garden. The boy figures out what is happening. The boy and his grandfather tell the truth. The book is illustrated by a young Pella artist named Saskia Koolwijk, who is Pim's older sister and who is, in real life, twenty-three and on her way to graduate school at the University of Iowa. The book will be published by the Iowa Children's Press in the spring. All proceeds go to the Iowa Watershed Trust. The first signing is scheduled at the Pella Public Library on the Saturday of Tulip Time next year. Helen Vossen is helping plan it; Dot is helping write the dedication. The dedication as currently drafted reads, in part: For the children who will one day inherit our wells, and who will one day defend them.
The Brinkmeer Farm Honest Garden Tour has become an annual event. The third Saturday of every Tulip Time, we open the farm from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Last year, we hosted 2,200 visitors. The proceeds, $21,400, went to the Iowa Watershed Trust, the Pella Public Library, and the new Marrit Beemster Memorial Garden Education Fund at the Pella Garden Club. Marrit had passed in February at age seventy-nine. She had asked in her final weeks that any memorial contributions be directed to a fund teaching honest growing practices to Iowa children. Dot and I underwrote the founding gift.