A dear friend of ours gives us a most welcome Christmas gift every year, an amaryllis. More correctly, I should say a future amaryllis; it’s a bulb in a box.
Every year I carefully follow the planting instructions. I put the hard, brown disc of potting medium into the plastic flowerpot, add water, watch the “soil” expand and plant the giant bulb.
This year I placed the pot in my kitchen window where it would get light and I could watch it grow. Each day for over three weeks I carefully checked for signs of life. Nothing. I concluded that this year’s bulb was D.O.A., dead on arrival, and moved it to the garage, figuring I could recycle the pot and soil in spring.
Three weeks go by. Then one day my husband comes into the kitchen and asks, “What is that weird plant in the garage?” For a second, I’m clueless. And then I remember my dead bulb. I retrieve my resurrected amaryllis from the garage and put it back at the kitchen window. Every day the stalk grows and grows and grows. The plant is growing at such a rapid pace that my husband and I almost spontaneously have the same thought… might we have Audrey in our kitchen? If you are not familiar with the play, Little Shop of Horrors, Audrey is a diabolical plant that takes over the shop.
Our Audrey has what appears to be a bud at the top of her skyscraper stalk, but nothing much is happening there as the stalk zooms upward. We speculate that her waterless and windowless sojourn in the garage might have destroyed her flowers. But we do not banish her a second time. We just let our phallic demon stay put at the window until one day…
It’s a miracle, wrapped in an enigma, as M. used to say.
Oh what a great story. I am going to reply here because I seem to have lost my Facebook account – don’t know what is wrong but I spent enough time today trying to fix it to no avail!! Anyway I love your story about your brave Audrey who just continued to keep trying to fulfill her destiny in spite of whatever is wrong with so many of the systems on earth now until she achieved her beautiful blossom!!! Much better than my poor Thanksgiving cactus which for years in our home blossomed on and off all year long with magnificent beauty and now no longer makes blossoms and appears to be having some genetic error going on whereby the slight little pink hint of a coming blossom turns into what looks like two big dead insect wings followed by the loss of that particular segment of the plant. 🙁