They'll Rise Again

 Back in the early 90’s, Bill and I were doing yardwork on an impossibly balmy and sweaty April morning when my mother-in-law Elsa called us, absolutely frantic. New neighbors had moved into the old house next door. There, a pair of lovely women named Mrs. Best and Mrs. Bole had lived and gardened in beautiful harmony for decades. Their yard was a shady paradise of blooming trees and flowers. But all that was soon to change. On this gorgeous spring day, Elsa looked out her kitchen window and was horrified to see her new neighbor ripping Mrs. Best and Bole's blooming daffodils out by the fistful and throwing them in the alley. It was his yard now and he didn't want daffodils, apparently. Why would you want daffodils? Just frippery. An annoyance.

 I understand a lot about the natural world, the one that works the way it's supposed to. The world of humans I will never comprehend. To be honest, I don't want to understand a thought process that leads to behavior like that. Life's too short.

 Elsa was in tears. “Julie!! You’ve got to come get these bulbs and plant them out at your place! They’re all special ones, too! I can’t let them die!” She didn’t have to ask twice. Bill and I raced the 18 miles into town and picked up several grocery bags that Elsa had already gathered. They were full of sad, wilted daffodils in full bloom. We picked up every one of them from the alley, where they'd have been pulverized by passing cars. I hope that guy wondered about the three of us, down on our knees, undoing what he'd just done. He probably just thought we were saps. People who'd run around saving caterpillars, or sick birds. He was right. Saps.

As soon as we got them home I drenched the plants in cool water, and apologized profusely.

Bill, who hated injustice and waste and suffering, asked where he should dig. I spun around and pointed to a place up by the vegetable garden and the fire circle, and that good man dug a deep trench about 20' long. In it we tenderly placed the bulbs and watered them in. It wasn't long before their leaves shriveled away, but we knew that wasn't the end of them. They would come back next spring.

And oh, they did. They didn't bloom much that first spring, but in successive springs they have put on a show. And like Elsa said, they are all special ones, not a dud in the bunch. I particularly love the white one with the strong yellow trumpet. And of course the fried egg ones, and the frilly scrambled egg ones. I love them all. 

Now they live here, on Indigo Hill, in a sanctuary for lost, beautiful things. They seem happy here. I have beaten the wisteria and trumpetvine back off them, year upon year. Now, with the clearing I've done, I can mow all around them. They're safe, and nobody's going to rip them out, ever again. 

Feel free to doubt the intelligence and depth of soul of some humans, but never doubt the resilience of plants. 

I'd love to let that end the post, but my life's in a blender, and I posted this from my phone--a first for me. I probably won't get back to the blog for a bit, so  I'm going to mention my next speaking engagements here.

ZICK ALERT!

On Saturday April 9, I'll give TWO talks to the Delaware Master Gardeners in Waldo, Ohio. I'll appear along with the amazing Jim McCormac, whose talk is a pictorial trip around Ohio, with a diverse cast of our most beautiful and fascinating flora and fauna. 

Jim points out that Waldo is the home of the G & R Grill, and the world's most famous fried bologna!

I'll deliver my new Guerilla Gardening talk, which is a history of my relationship with my land, and the past three years' intensive habitat reclamation efforts (ack, I already need to update it with the latest!). In the afternoon, I'll give my Saving Jemima book talk, as dessert.

I have been insanely busy, preparing my most special plants for a little plant sale at my table. I really hope to find homes for some fantastic tuberose bulbs, orchids, Achimenes, evening primroses, fuchsias...oh my!

The public is welcome!

 For registration and further information, go here: 

Delaware Co. Master Gardeners Spring Meet

On the evening of Monday, April 25, 2022,  I'll give a garden talk and sell plants for the Morgan County Master Gardeners at the beautiful McConnellsville, Ohio, Opera House. For more information, please call Sarah McDougal, Adult Services Coordinator, Kate Love Simpson Library 740-962-2533

Easter Release!

 Three weeks is a long time in a human life. Imagine taking antibiotics for three weeks. After ten days, I'm ready to jump out of my skin. Now imagine being a very small bird, weighing less than half an ounce. You could mail two American goldfinches with one letter stamp. Well, as of this writing you could...

Some of these birds have been in this cage since March 4. Over the next four days I caught so darn many, snagging them off the tube feeders, that I just put that batch together in the largest cage I had (17 "x 20" x 25." The last one was caught March 8, so I had to hold the entire batch of six until that one was finished with its 21 day course of Tylan. 

Two large cages are sequestered in a quiet back bedroom that once belonged to Liam. When he came home this weekend I had to put him in a different room. He didn't complain--he was just glad to be home in a comfy bed, hanging with his mom and pet curdog, instead of his "cot" at college. And oh was it nice to see him for a few days! 

 This cage faces out onto the east hill, so the birds can see where they will fly soon. I keep the three sides facing into the room covered with a sheet. When the sun comes in I can spy on them. Keep your eye on the little female who starts the video popping up and down like popcorn on the left side of the cage. She then moves to pulling at a thread hanging from the cage cover. Oh, do these birds want OUT. 

And out they shall go. I wanted so badly to document it! I lay awake for several nights in the wee hours, trying to figure out how to execute both the release and a slow-motion video of it. I made a stiff cardboard false top for the cage and thought about pulling it off the cage with a string while manning the camera. Dumb, dumb, dumb, and I might inadvertantly injure a bird in doing it. Julie. You idiot. Just call Shila and ask her to make the dang video! I finally succeeded in fighting back Pioneer Woman long enough to make the call, and my faithful and talented photographer friend drove out to make this video. This is typical behavior for me, but it's exacerbated by long isolation.  I exhaust every possibility before I finally admit I need someone to help me. Shila is almost always that someone! I am so blessed to call her my friend.

 

Sharp observers will note that one goldfinch (probably the one who pulled threads and hopped up and down like a kindergartner) failed to leave. Never worry. She got out in the next wave.

Extra sharp observers will also note that I have gotten a MUCH needed haircut since this release video was made. If you thought you were reading a lifestyle and beauty blog, my presence in this video should serve to alert you that you're in the wrong place. In subsequent slo-mo release videos, I am going to endeavor to try not to look so much like I'm giving birth to a barnyard animal.

It feels SO GOOD to let these birds go. If this months-long ordeal has taught me anything, it's that I have less than zero desire to cage any bird, for one minute longer than I have to, in order to help it. 

And as I'm writing that sentence, an Eastern Phoebe lands on a low wall right in my sight. She flutters to the patio and looks hard at two twigs lying there. She's thinking about nesting! Two nights ago, a phoebe who might have been her spooked off the roost around 9:30 pm when I turned on the porch light to take Curtis out for his last wee. It blundered around the front stoop, bonking into the lit windows and hopping on the ground, until I caught it and brought it inside to spend a safe night in a Critter Keeper. Not going to let that precious bird fall prey to the screech-owl who leaves big white puddles on my front porch! 

The phoebe was not amused to be Gentle Cobra'ed and brought into the bright light of my kitchen. Please pardon my impudent digit; you can see more of the bird with that middle finger out of the way, and there's nothing I can do about it. Gotta love that rapidly snapping bill. I never knew phoebes did that. The two I hand-raised never had occasion to be that afraid or defensive. 

Cages have their place, and this spring they're all over my living space,  but my favorite thing to do with them is open the top and let that bird fly. Off it goes, into the sunrise!

 Remember Mr. Netinyahoo, the evil little goldfinch who evaded capture for days, then flew up to the clerestory windows in the living room? Here he is, feeling EVER so much better, on April 4. Still ornery though!

I can attest that he is fat as butter! Oh how I love to see them come back to life, and get sleek and fat again.

I caught him this morning to put him in the last cage, which will be released April 17. As of Easter Sunday, I am down to five birds in two cages, and after caring for 18, that feels like quite a load off my shoulders. 

I had better clear some bird care space, because the bluebirds are not wasting any time! Without any supplemental food at all, this little gal has five warm eggs as of the morning of April 3. Holy cow. In a hurry, she is! And that little phoebe I kept overnight? Already setting on eggs in a mud nest under the back deck. 

My, how Spring marches on. We have to just try to keep up, lurching along in her wake. 

We had two nights in the lower 20's, April 2 and 3. I figured my daffodils, roses, lilacs, bluebells, daylilies were all toast. Still I covered and fussed. And all but the poor kiwi vine came through with flying colors--literally!

As is usual with Nature, the joke was on me. 

Happy Easter from my little family to yours. 

On Grief

 

I can’t remember ever being able to smell daffodils all over the yard, but they are stinking up the place this year, blowing yellow trumpets along every wall and border. The best they’ve ever been, I’m sure. They didn’t get frozen hard after they went to bud, for once; didn’t have to lie down in translucent submission to winter’s slap.

 It’s two years tomorrow since you died, March 25, 2019, and I feel as if it’s me with six feet of 

sandy loam between me and the grass and sky. Why is that? Why at the two year mark? Has anyone studied this? Today, I am impervious to joy. I see it all around me but I can’t feel it, I can’t make it up through grief’s deep clay. Look, everything tried to lift me up, but it barely worked. I cried at lunch, I cried at dinner, even though I took nice food out onto the patio I had built for myself. I fed a lot of it to Curtis. At lunch I looked straight up, bawling, at a creamy white cloud and there were three hawks circling silently—a pair of redshoulders being escorted off to the west by a very large, very white- bellied, broad-breasted redtail.

 At this point I know her just by her tanklike shape, but I look, I must make sure; I wait for her to turn and yes! There is the light hitting off the rumpled white feathers on her torn and mended right patagium, the one she ripped on barbed wire before I found her hanging there on October 25, 2019. How is it that I get to see her again? And how is it that seeing her just makes me cry more? Nature tries, I cry.

 

And Nature tried again—a raven circled high, high above, a wedge-tailed, still-winged marvel, letting out a rolling croak, just to the north of the tower atop our house, the one you dreamt, the one we had built, the one that was worth building just to know we could do that. Nobody but you thinks to build a tower on their house. And while I was watching the raven, the lisping tlit! of a tree swallow, first of the year, and my unbelieving eyes watched it cross the path of the raven. How is it that I got to see those two birds together? And this morning, the ringing wild song of the first Louisiana waterthrush came up out of Goss’ Fork, and only now do I remember when writing about it that right after we met you wrote me a song about how “the waterthrush so sweetly sighs,” rhyming that with “the warmth in her butternut eyes.”  It was the first song you wrote for me, and it was a fairly good one. Not many people get good songs written to them. I put that in my basket of pluses. Those two fine kids, too, the best music we made. 

  

 

All this happened today. At sunset I sat out on your little patio and a woodcock flittered back behind the great brushpile I’ve built—I know the sound of their wings. And then a big red bat came circling over and over around the back yard, the evening sun lighting its chestnut wings and setting its cinnabar hair afire. My favorite bat. Well, OK, there’s my favorite bat now, circling. It’s all piling up. The meadow woodcock started up calling and dancing, adding its twitter, hiccup and beep to the evening drag racers out on the county road, to the moron’s roar of engines and barking dogs in three directions. Clinging to the magic I could hear above the din, I decided to walk out the orchard in the moonlight to see if there were more woodcocks out there. No, but there were spring peepers in the wet field below, and I needed those. On my way back by your parents’ graves, a brown thrasher, the first of the year, scolded me with a dry skidding tuff! call, one I know by heart, knowing a little something about brown thrashers. Again, a first of the year, and my first ever heard in the dark. I thought then that this means it’s time to plant the peas, but the thought  brought no leap of excitement; it just made me tired. More tussling with my faint-hearted gas rototiller, with no one to even hear me cuss.

 

I sat on the stone bench and listened to the woodcock, then headed out the meadow in the bright moonlight, to the big black shadow of the lone pine that watches over your grave. I thought how odd it was that I could lose you quickly, so sadly, and now can only sit down by your bones. But at least there is something of you here. I feel lucky to have that much. Not many people get that.

 I thought I might tell you how it all was today, how it has been for me here alone, but found I had nothing to say that wasn’t covered by the moonlight. I looked at the perfect black blot of my head’s shadow on the still-bare clay of your grave, looked at the black spikes of liatris poking up, heard you in my head saying, “Prairie GAAAAYfeather!” and sort of quarter-smiled. I looked at the outline of our house against the sky, the only light a pale blue glow emanating from my little fishtank in the kitchen. I needed some other souls in the kitchen, so I bought three tiny guppies, who swim up and down and side to side in their miniature world, begging for flakes. 

 The guppies, my sweet dog,

 the sunset luau of that hibiscus,

 the daffodils, the patio…the endless brush cutting and clearing; even the 16 goldfinches twittering in their cages all over the house; the bats and woodcocks and thrashers and wrinkly dry peas counted out…they’re all hedges against sorrow, really, they’re what keeps me with the living, on this side of the clay. Today was hard. Tomorrow will be what it will be, I suppose, and my feet will go on, and my heart will have to go along with them.

To you, Will.

Challishing* in Whipple

I'm sitting at a table alive with daffodils and bicolored tulips in vases. I had to buy those. Two huge appleblossom pink amaryllis tower over them. Those, I grew from babies. Outside, the ground and sky are stubbornly, resolutely white. It was a weekend. Friday afternoon Bill and I hand-carried a ton or so of music equipment up a snowy hill in a blizzard to the van, because we couldn't pull down to the basement door. Loaded that. Bill, the kids and I drove in two cars to Columbus in a three-hour, white-knuckle nightmare of slush and overturned cars so we could play our Swinging Orangutangs gig for the Ohio Ornithological Society. The other Orangs made it, but everyone was hollow-eyed and shell-shocked by the time they staggered in. Something about seeing trucks losing control in front of you takes the shine off winter driving.

The people who were able to get there at all enjoyed it, and so did we. The band busted down the doors and had a great time, ate fire-hot chicken wings and drank bad margaritas at midnight and then flopped in our hotel. That was nice. I drove home with the kids on Saturday afternoon, ran out of gas, coasted down the providential exit ramp, walked to a station, bought a $9 one-gallon gas can, and spent twenty minutes just trying to figure out how to assemble the childproof nozzle and cap so I could put the damn gallon in my dead car. By then it had started snowing again, and I resumed my death grip on the wheel to guide us home. The roads were lousy; our driveway was very nearly impassable. Another foot. Another freakin' foot of snow. What is going on??

Sunday morning I shoveled leaden wet snow for two hours, and practically had to call a Whipple Township trustee meeting to get our driveway plowed out so we could have 19 people over Sunday afternoon for an early birthday celebration for Bill of the Birds, who was still in Columbus volunteering for the OOS event (he's the emcee with the mostest). I had raided my favorite stores in Columbus--Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. I bought the biggest fattest Whole Foods spears of Mexican asparagus that you have ever seen; I was making sweet potato hash, baby Swiss quiche and slow-roasted baby back ribs for 20, and in my book having all that fabulous fresh food and an impassable driveway is an unqualified Domestic Emergency. Luckily the trustees agreed, at least in theory, and a huge tractor with a blade showed up to deliver this resolute foodqueen from disaster in her snowbound castle. The dinner was a smashing success. If I had had my choice, I wouldn't have started a full day of heavy cooking with several hours of shoveling wet snow and finding someone to remove same from a quarter-mile-long driveway. But this winter, at least for me, is all about having no choice. I feel like a feedsack full of boulders today.

Any more, our house feels like McMurdo Station, the outside having changed from my second home to an inhospitable, barely-navigable place that makes me miserable. The snow is a mess to walk through, all crusty and bumpy. The idea of taking a hike in it is about as appealing as pounding my shins with a hammer. Chet and I have grown fat and lazy in our enforced confinement. There was one day--one day--when we saw a few bare patches of grass, but by nightfall it was being covered up again, and within two days we had another foot of it on the ground.

After my shoveling and plowing adventure, I decided that I had one good thing to say about the latest foot of heavy wet snow. You can grab handfuls of it and scrub the starling sh*t off the bird feeders.

There. There's your silver lining.

Hence the vases upon vases of daffodils and tulips, the blooming amaryllis, the orchids. I am challishing**, and these are the decorations in my hospital room.


a detail of a new Guatemalan quilt I just broke out for the occasion.

My neighbor Beth said she saw a woodcock wandering along the side of our road. Poor thing. He should have been singing, displaying and mating for two weeks now. Instead he ekes out a living on almost nothing. I don't even want to think about what happens to woodcocks who arrive on schedule to find more than a foot of snow on their lekking and feeding grounds. I can't imagine what they find to eat. Maybe they go into the woods and poke around in the unfrozen parts of streams.

We're out of sunflower seed. Again. Gotta buy another 150 pounds of seed next trip into town. Gotta make another sextupled batch of Zick Dough. Gotta keep those bluebirds going. Gotta get another 40 lb. of corn for the four whitetail fawns who are losing all fear of me, the Good Corn Fairy. Gotta toss out the old pork roast for the three crows I adore, who will now come up right under the studio window and cock their bright eyes at me. If I look directly at them they turn their backs and wigwag away, arms crossed behind their backs, as if the last thing on their minds was begging, but they're begging, make no mistake. I've got them right where I want them, and they've got me. I love, love, love my crows.

I stick my nose into the daffodils and breathe deeply of their polleny yellow scent. The tulips, fainter but sweetly heady. They keep growing in the vase, their long stems twisting like curious necks. I don't know how they do that, grow with no bulb or roots as fuel, but I'm glad they do. Something has to be growing in this wasteland.


Never have I been so winter-weary, so thoroughly pummeled, pounded and beaten by a winter. I can't remember what it feels like to take the wheel of a car and not worry about the road conditions. I can't remember T-shirts or a warm breeze lifting the downy hairs on my arms. I can't remember going outside without a hat and parka.


So I fill the vases with storebought spring, and wait.


** a lovely Yiddish word meaning, "to die slowly, inch by inch."

Drowning in Flowers

The hawthorn hedge is snowing white petals.

Why is it that, just when everything starts to go nuts outside, my orchids inside do too? Couldn't I get a little flower love in January and February? Nope, it all comes at once. I hardly know what to do.

The last daffodils are fading outside. Only late pink Salome and a few King Alfreds and smaller narcissus are still hanging on. I wanted to share some photos of our daffodils this year, because never has there been a finer year for bulbs in southern Ohio. The flowers are huge and abundant, the leaves tall and long. The growing conditions last year suited them just fine, I suspect.

My mother-in-law Elsa Thompson, Publisher Emeritus of Bird Watcher's Digest, is a great gardener, and a respecter of old things, fine things. She has an extraordinary eye for beauty.
She's also a fabulous cook, and sets a mean Easter table.For years, the big house right across the alley from the Thompsons was owned by two elderly sisters who grew beautiful flowers. When the sisters died, the house was sold, and Elsa was horrified to see the new homeowner ripping out the ladies' daffodils--in full bloom--and throwing them out into the alley.

For some people, nothing, or concrete, suits them better than beauty. I don't pretend to understand them, but they're generally the ones with the overactive weedwhackers, the chemical lawns and the perfectly trimmed ball-shaped shrubs. The ones who consider birds sort of a nuisance, like blooming daffodils. My friend Rob put up a bluebird box in a woman's Connecticut backyard. The bluebirds nested successfully, but when the babies came out and sat on the deck railing, she asked Rob to take the box down so the bluebirds wouldn't nest again. Why? The bluebirds were pooping on her railing, and that made her mad, because she had to go out and hose it off every day. Well, he took the box down, because nobody who can think that way deserves bluebirds on their deck railing. These are the folks who are missing out on all the best things in life. As my father would say in his most pious voice, "They are more to be pitied than censured."

Elsa hurried out and gathered the dying bulbs and put them in shopping bags, and being out of room in her own garden, she gave them to Bill and me for our farm. "I know these don't look like much now, but they're very special daffodils--all fancy kinds. You'll love them." I looked at the withered leaves and wondered if they'd survive the insult, having been dug up in the height of bloom. Bill dug a long trench and we dropped the bulbs in and covered them over and watered them. That was about ten years ago.

They lived.And they are loved.


Liam is not to be pitied; he eats a ripe pear, up to his eyeballs in flowers, and loving it in an offhand, nine-year-old boy way. He's always been surrounded by flowers.


Speaking of flower rescue, I found this exquisite creature at a big box store in February. I had to get it out of there. And I got one for Elsa, too. They're both blooming their heads off for us, even putting out more buds from the tips! Orchids know when they're appreciated.

Psychopsis mendenhall "Hildos" is working on its tenth flower since last June. That's an average of one a month, all year long, all off the same 3' tall stalk. You have to love an orchid like that. And I do, I do.
Party on wit yo bad self, little Kabuki lobster clown dude.

Laeliocattleya Firedance "Patricia" is unequivocal about her color.
As is my elegant huge purple Phalaenopsis, one of the first orchids I ever got, as a tiny baby from Shila.
I love the intricate ones.
Back in the bedroom, everything's going nuts, as usual in April.
While outside, the hot wind is whipping lilac flowers open. This enormous lilac is another heirloom from Bill's family, via Elsa. It's 15 feet tall now, planted right outside my studio windows, and the room is full of the perfume of lilacs. I told you she knows the good stuff.

I'm overloading. If only I could parcel it out from November to March. Just drowning in flowers.

What's Blooming Now

Did everyone turn off their lights from 8:30-9:30 on Saturday? We did. We're pretty good at dealing without electricity, after this winter. If anyone's wondering, that's a vintage Poll Parrot clock on the wall, a second anniversary gift Bill and I gave each other. The mysterious black machine beneath the clock filters our water five times, ozonates, carbon polishes it, and, we hope, fills us with never-ending health and goodness. I couldn't live without Mr. Goodwater.

Turning the lights off made us notice how beautiful daffodils are by candlelight. So are clivias.


The Clivia miniata (Kafir lily) I've nurtured for three years has three huge bursts of orange, fragrant blossoms. This, for having left it bone-dry in a cold basement all winter. That's what it likes.

I love flower time. I really, really love flowers. Outside, there are crocuses and daffodils galore.


When we first moved here, there was a sad little straight line of fancy daffodils that ran right through the middle of the lawn. It had once lined a driveway that was no more, and it no longer made sense in the landscape. So we mowed around them for a few years, then dug them up out of the rock-hard soil and planted them in the soft compost of our new raised flower beds. This is just a fraction of the daffodils we now have.

The big dig was about 14 years ago. They have multiplied to the point that I dig up daffodil bulbs with everything I try to plant in those beds. I can bring them in by the armload and never notice I've cut them, there are so many bobbing and dancing in the cold spring wind. All that from just a few bulbs, transplanted to a place they can thrive and multiply. Plants just give and give and give.

Meanwhile, out in the greenhouse, everyone's going k-k-k-krazy.Look at the little red and yellow bells of Abutilon megapotamicum. All the gerania that were just leaves in my last post are blooming their heads off.

Inside the house, the orchids are winding up. Oh Lord, I love this time of year, when I get up every morning and peek down into their paired leaves to see if I can find a new bloom spike starting. Plants are blooming this spring that haven't bloomed for years. I think it's the massive repotting I did in November, that's what I think. I think it's the Aussie Gold medium I used. It's payback time. The diatomaceous earth in the Aussie Gold medium seems to have licked the mealybugs, and throwing out sick plants helped a lot. Not to mention the thorough washing and spraying they got in November, in that marathon of orchidaceous labor. With orchids, it's all about being willing to wait.

Psychopsis Mendenhall "Hildos" is about to unfurl another dancing flamenco lobster, its eighth since last June. Ahhh.

Here's Laeliocattleya " Firedance Patricia" about to haul off and give me some red flowers.
You can tell it's happy because the new growth off to the left side is so robust and full of buds.


The promise in those fat bronze buds...the anticipation of waiting for them to open...such fun. And then a few days go by and boom, they open.
But for now, the undisputed Queen of the Collection is a Brassaevola cross called "Morning Glory." I....love.....this.....plant.
The flowers are enormous, three inches or more across, and fragrant. OK, you had me at enormous, but fragrant? Almost seems too much to ask for. Now, pull back and look at the entire plant, which is a couple of feet across at this point.


That's what I'm talkin' about. A plant that is self-actualizing, blooming from every new growth point, practically leaping from its pot in exuberance. At last count, sixteen blossoms open at once. Stinkin' up the place.

These are the things that happen when plants are happy, when the lines of caring and communication are open between plant and caretaker. You feel like an orchid samurai, keeper of ancient secrets, axion of ability, but really, it's just this little magical thing that happens when you care enough to figure out how to do the right thing.

On Friday, I made my way back from my speaking engagement in Middletown by way of Columbus. There was to be a huge orchid show and sale, if the American Orchid Society and Central Ohio Orchid Society web sites were to be believed, running from Friday through Sunday at an airport hotel. I drove around in circles looking for the right Mariott, and when I finally found the entrance, I made my way inside the huge atrium where I teamed up with two equally confused women who'd driven down from Detroit, who, when I spotted them, had that look of the orchid fancier about them: smart, sharply dressed, well-tended. (I am a distinct anomaly). We wandered around asking custodians about it until someone told us which conference room might hold the show. Finally we found a room with a few orchids on a folding table, nothing more. It seems the web sites had misled us; setup was Friday, and the show actually opened Saturday morning. The vendors hadn't even arrived yet.

Oh.

The orchid ladies from Detroit, who'd driven three hours expressly to buy some new orchids, were a good deal more perturbed than I. I immediately took it as a cosmic smackdown, and actually felt relieved. Clearly, I don't need any more orchids than the 38 currently cramming my shelves, and the gods agree about that. I climbed back in the Exploder, kissed Chet Baker, and headed home to enjoy what I already have. Which, in truth, is way more than enough. A fact that will make itself clear next November, at the next repotting marathon.

It's not having what you want.
It's wanting what you've got.

Sheryl Crow, "Soak Up the Sun"