Thursday, February 7, 2019

Oh Yeah?



Maybe I am personifying my plants too much, but my post yesterday about how my big plants got lazy and leaned against the wall made me think of another story involving Jolly Bob. I found this plant one day while driving home from a now-defunct restaurant by that name with Tiffy, and she laughed when I saw the plant discarded on the corner and pulled over to grab it. At that time it was about three feet tall, and as is often the case, was actually two dracaena plants in one pot. The two plants grew taller and taller, and then one day one of them sent up a shoot from the base that started to grow into a new stalk. Within a couple of weeks, the second plant had sent up an identical shoot, and I always felt like it was all, “Oh yeah? Two can play this game!” The two new stalks continued to grow at an identical rate and are now just a bit taller than the original plants were when I acquired them. Now people can argue that plants have no consciousness and cannot decide to do something, that they simply bloom or turn toward the sun – or send out new shoots – because of conditions, and that it isn’t weird that identical conditions would cause both plants to do the same thing at the same time. Still, they don’t do all the same things all the time; for example, one of the original Jolly Bob stalks grew a branch off of it, and the other one didn’t. It just looked so funny the way the two new stalks grew that it seemed like the second one was a retort to the first one, and that’s the way I like to think it happened. Maybe someday science will back me up on this. Who knows?

Isn’t this weather weird? It’s like winter felt bad for arriving late, so it made us a mix tape, a sort of “Best Of” (Worst Of?) compilation. Here – have some snow! Now a polar vortex! And now sleet! How about ice everywhere? You can have it all!

Famous Hat

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