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Given the news these days, staying informed can leave me pretty discouraged. To cheer myself up I take time to watch flowers bloom in our small backyard and to check progress on the basil and parsley plants we make into pesto, which I love. Right now, in high summer, there’s enough basil for a full batch every week.
Last Friday, I’d barely opened the door to the basement, where we keep the food processor we use for the pesto, when our cat, Sunny, dashed past me down the stairs. We’d worked to prevent this ever since I found a pile of cat scat in a corner a few months before. I hurried after him, trying to keep up while he darted this way and that, examining cobwebs, batting scraps of paper, sniffing things I couldn’t see, probably bugs. When he scooted behind a pile of Christmas boxes next to an old cabinet, I rushed to catch him on the other side. Then I froze.
On the cement floor close to the back wall, in the alley between the boxes and the dark-colored cabinet, was a large amaryllis just past full bloom. It was white! Except for the flower, the plant was entirely white: three pure white stalks a foot or more tall, each at a different stage of blooming. One stalk’s red striped blooms had shriveled and were turning brown—clearly past their prime. The shortest stalk swelled into a white pod at the top, a hint of pink inside. The largest stalk, which might have reached two feet, leaned over the pot almost to the floor, weighed down by its bright red flower.
This was the plant I’d carefully prepared for dormancy and stowed down here in January, at least six months ago. As Google directed, after it flowered around Thanksgiving, I’d let the leaves grow and then die back on their own. I stopped watering it. I left a dried-out bulb in a pot of dirt. I’d thought to revive it in time for my children’s birthdays at the end of September.
I had no idea this was possible. It had been bone dry for six months! Two nascent leaves at the bottom of the spent stalk were stark white. Yet the open flowers showed bright red with thin pale stripes, just as they had the last time they bloomed.
Leaning the heavy stalk against one arm, I carefully maneuvered my treasure up to the kitchen. I lowered it onto the table and grabbed a cardboard box from the floor for the flowered stalk to rest on. I gave it some water, but not too much, assuming that this was the right thing to do. I located a garden stake in the mudroom and stuck it in the edge of the pot to secure that stalk upright. Then I carried this strange creature slowly up the stairs and set it on a stool in front of the large window in what we call our sunroom—where we eat breakfast and watch our indoor flowers grow. I insisted my husband come bear witness to my discovery before I retrieved the food processor from the basement, and we turned to washing basil and peeling garlic for the pesto.
The next morning, as we sat sipping our tea and munching our toast, Will listened patiently while I talked on and on, rhapsodizing about the pale amaryllis, repeating the same things over and over. “I had no idea! … No green at all! … How could that happen?”
I stared at it for a while without speaking, then turned to Will. “Don’t you just marvel at this amazing plant, how it grew in the dark, without water?”
He paused. “I don’t marvel,” he said quietly. “I rejoice.”
When Will said “I rejoice,” I heard that, unlike myself, he didn’t stop to question how this might be; he accepted it and let it become part of him. My “marvel” contains a relentless feeling of inexplicability, an urgent need to understand. I can’t quite fathom this level of goodness, a life force, maybe how some people imagine God or the Light. And I can’t stop wanting to figure it out.
By the end of that day, the slightest hint of green showed on the tall stalk. By the second morning the older stalk was light green and one of its tiny leaves showed pink. Today—the fourth morning—even the stump of the spent stalk is green, and what had been barely visible leaves have more than tripled in size. I removed the garden stake I’d used to brace the flopped main stalk. It had straightened itself out in the sunny window and stands tall and secure on its own, although by now all but one of its flower sections has faded.
As the plant gains strength and color, I can’t stop thinking about its viability and vitality. How could this dormant being rouse itself without any intervention? Without water? Or light? Without my noticing it through all my trips to the basement, time after time? How long had it been growing? It would have taken weeks for all those blooms to open and then fade. If chlorophyll is necessary to turn light into energy, how could it both grow and be so white? How could something so apparently impossible have happened?
Marvel, a kind of awed questioning, vs. rejoice, to celebrate the gift as given, hold it, take it in, accept it without reservation. I’m fascinated by this gift, the resilience of this plant, the irresistible urge to live and to grow—nature and life. My scientist husband doesn’t need to explain what happened in order to delight in our amaryllis’ rebirth. Maybe I don’t have to understand how what appears unfathomable comes about.
Maybe I can take heart even in the face of increasingly dire conditions around the world—hundred-year storms every couple of years, massive droughts and floods and raging wildfires. Even as West Coast smoke dims East Coast skies I might hold out hope for our poor planet. I might even hold out hope for us humans. Perhaps we, too, can adapt and grow.
A week ago, I’d have said my hopes were too far-fetched, that I was way too optimistic. Today, I’m not so sure.
