Pictured here is, of course, this year's appearance of Blc Lily Marie Almas 'Sun Bulb' Orange, a Cattleya hybrid that I purchased from Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in years past. Although I was so inattentive that I didn't see the flower spikes growing, she is right on time, or perhaps just a little early this year. Last year, I blogged that she gifted me with two flowers on December 1st, and here she is, reincarnated, with 4 flowers this year on November 22nd. I feel a bit guilty, maybe a little unworthy, that she struggles so mightily each year to gift me such sudden joy, but I will certainly take delight from whence it comes in this lost COVID year.
Lost year. I suspect that is how history is going to record 2020, and many of my contemporaries will agree. Our pets have prospered with all the extra home attention, and I suspect that the private vegetable and flower gardens of the world may have been a little better tended and a little less weedy this year, but, for most people, it has been a year of tension and apprehension, fear and fretting. It has not, for ProfessorRoush, been quite so frightful on that front however. I've worried for friends and family, but not for myself; there's too much work to be done and I'm far too fatalistic to worry about my own health. I take precautions, but with my colleagues, I have worked right through this whole mess, missing the crowds of students in hallways, but relishing those few contacts we still have. Arbeit macht Glück, in my case.
'Lily Marie Almas', will be just another chapter in my upcoming memoir, How To Remain Happy and Hopeful During the Apocalypse. I have a secret, you see, a secret to staying happy, a chart for remaining cheerful, a recipe for rose-colored repose. It's just this; enjoy the little things and shed the little stings. From little bits of happiness, we can, each of us, build a great big house of joy to keep the world at bay, bricks of bliss against the gloom. Said another way, the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," as Shakespeare put it, are no match for the simple practice of welcoming and engaging with every happy moment, not "carpe diem," but rather "carpe beatitudo." Seize happiness my friends, whenever you can.
What a nice post, ProfessorRoush! I, too, had some unexpected blooms this fall. One of my bearded irises bloomed in all its glory, just before a freeze. I brought the stemmed buds insdie where I enjoyed the blooms for a couple of weeks. My Christmas cactus bloomed fabulously in October, even every cutting I had put in tiny terra cotta pots. And then my Hooker's Orchid Cactus that I had transplanted a couple of cuttings suddenly bloomed again in October! Crazy, but a delight. Do hope it's a sign for renewal and a better year ahead.
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