A Splash of Wonder from Nubs of Nothing

Well, I'm still alive.  And it's wonderful.  While I'm not quite ready, like Simeon in the New Testament after glimpsing the baby Jesus, to pray, "Lord, let me now depart in peace, for my eyes have seen..." I do feel like something of a milestone has been reached.  I suppose that in the grand scheme of things it isn't all that important, but I would call it wondrous -- and something of divinity within my reach.

When the nursery man first handed it to us at the store -- a pot of soil with two short protruding nubs -- I asked pessimistically if I would still be alive by the time it finally had anything to show for itself.  He didn't so much answer as merely knowingly smile. 

Since that day it has hardly been left to itself.  We have been attentive, and more or less patient.  It has grown -- surprisingly so -- from those two little nubs into a nascent stalks and eventually into bush-like proportions.  A few weeks ago buds appeared -- barely berry-size, but there dotting the branches.  Day by day they swelled -- prune-sized, and then more.  And then something began to peek out from the tips of the buds -- a purple so deep is was almost black.  Then time, it seemed, stood still.  It was as though after all that climbing, a plateau had been reached and all creation would have to wait while it gathered in its second breath necessary to finally reach that vista.  Or having crowned, a rest before birth's final push.

I have a love/hate relationship with patience.  Anticipation can almost consume me -- which is wonderful when planning a vacation.  That is the very reason we choose to plan them so far in advance; that way we get to enjoy the trip over and over again -- before we even begin it.  The trip itself becomes less the main event than the sorbet at the end of an already glorious meal.  But that kind of distractedness is not all that great when other matters demand some of that attention -- like work.  That, and I am only in my old age beginning to make peace with this notion of delayed gratification.  So it is that I have both hated and loved these months of anticipation.  All this time, and in the face of driving rain and ferocious winds, I have watched and watered and worried and waited and fed and frequently fretted over this fragile, emergent life; anxious to finally behold its floral denouement.

Waited, that is, until yesterday afternoon.  When I left for a meeting early in the morning I could see that something was different.  Looking back, I suppose it had finally emerged, but not yet opened.  Returning home later in the day, the distractions finally satisfied, we crept back to the soil bed beside the house.

And smiled...

...a delight that, given the swarm of surrounding buds...

...is the first of many to come.