Signs

No, not the decidedly hokey - yet still somehow disturbing Mel Gibson movie....

Signs. I am always looking for signs, I think. At least I always seem to be finding them. I know I have hinted at this before.... Mentioning the nesting mourning dove and our anniversary redbud budding on our anniversary despite what it had been through are fine examples. I am not a kook (okay, maybe a little) - I simply don't believe in coincidence.

Every now and then I run across something that seems signficant -- but can't for the life of me figure out what it means.... I have an example to run past my blog audience -- and perhaps one or two of you who share my distaste for random, meaningless events can offer some clues for interpretation:

Before we moved here to Pascagoula - we owned a small house in Gulfport, MS. The lady who sold us the house had a passion for heirloom flowers... and managed to leave one or two things in the garden when she moved out. I was clueless and probably dug up plenty of fantastic things in the process of renovating the garden... One such thing was saved though... A huge baking potato-sized bulb with a single green sprout... much too big for me to mistake for a clump of dirt or an old weed. I asked my mother what it was. She told me it looked like an amaryllis. I didn't know what that was... she said it would get big beautiful flowers. That sounded good -- so I tossed the bulb into an empty flower pot and proceeded to totally forget about it.

Being a packrat - I never discarded the old flowerpot... but used it to toss leftover soil whenever I potted a new plant. For over five years I threw dirt in that pot... with not so much a peep from the big potato thing buried in the bottom.

When we moved to Pascagoula in 2003 -- there was so much to unpack that it took a while for me to get around to the dirt-filled flowerpots that we had stacked in a corner of the garage, but when I finally did I found one large cracked pot with a single sickly-greenish yellow sprout of something sticking out of it. Suddenly, I remembered the old bulb and wondered at how it had managed to survive for so long. I had great respect for the poor blob and transferred it into a flowerbed near the corner of the house. That year it managed to grow a leaf. I was very proud of it for this. The next year it grew two small leaves...

Now during this time I had become acquainted with amaryllis... and my gardening skills had greatly improved in general... I became convinced that the old bulb would probably never do anything more than produce a scant leaf now and then... but that was fine with me. It had earned a protected spot in the garden just for putting up with my neglect for over half a decade.

The spring of 2005 brought no improvement and the stunted and slightly discoloured leaves were hidden by neighboring chrysanthemums.... The storm surge of August 29th caused everything in that flowerbed to wither and disappear. I mean, literally, disappear without a trace... no roots.. not even a dead plant to mourn over.

When the old bulb shot out a couple of its trademark stunted leaves a couple weeks later -- I was in awe. A few weeks after that - it produced several healthy leaves... and a few weeks after that -- it managed to multiply. Really!! Where there had once been a single clump of skinny sickly leaves -- there were now two robust clumps side-by-side. I joked with Dave that it must have really liked the salt water....

But there's more! Look what I found in my garden this morning:

For the first time in almost nine years -- the old plant actually bloomed... and quite beautifully, at that. So now I'm all excited at the prospect of propagating from this bulb and spreading the old flowers all over my new garden... a touch of the past -- of our past as well -- and a fellow Katrina survivor, too! But...

What's it all about??