In Which We Receive Flowers!

Life feels like it has been more momentous than usual lately. I have had some good times and I've had some bad times. I'm fortunate that I have friends who are willing to walk through both the good and the bad with me.

The doorbell rang around 5 pm on Thursday, and we opened it to discover a guy standing there with flowers: three African violets in a basket, sent by a dear Facebook friend named Karen (and her husband Dave), whom I have chatted with often online but never met. The card on it said that the flowers were to celebrate my birthday and offer condolences on the loss of our beloved cat, Dexter. They are just lovely!

So the next day, I posed Tiny Tiger on the flowers to take a picture. His friend Quetzal the little green bird insisted on joining in for the little photo shoot, so here they are together, looking quite festive indeed.

Let me tell you a thing you do not know. Both of my grandmothers had green thumbs, and they were both big fans of African violets, especially the purple kind. They had them in lots of windows. So over the years, I've acquired some plants.

Since about 1987, I have almost always had a cat, and I discovered pretty early on that cats and plants didn't mix. The crowning glory was the day the cat (Gremlin, a big orange boy, and the first tabbycat that was my very own) leapt up high onto the shelving unit, grabbed the schefflera in his paws, swung out like Tarzan, and pulled the plant, dirt and all, down onto the television set. The next day, all the plants went in to work. I'd had ENOUGH.

And then I became a course designer, and I worked on a horticulture course in the late 1980s that won a national award. Guess what it featured: labs teaching students how to propagate leaf cuttings, using African violets! (Yes, a leaf cutting will produce roots in either water or soil.) Suddenly, I had lots and lots of plants. And I decorated my various offices at Penn State with them.

Then I was moved into an office without windows, and I gave all of my plants away, except for one, a Norfolk Island pine tree. (Late last year, I was finally moved into an office with windows again.) The Norfolk Island pine came home with me for good this past March, and got moved upstairs recently after our cat Dexter passed. 

Well, guess what, with this gift and the most recent gift from my siblings, it appears that I have plants again!  :-) Thank you, thank you!

The soundtrack song for African violets is this one: Toto, with Africa.