The clivia plant is blooming now. It’s almost fully open. It really is beautiful. I don’t notice any scent with the boom, but maybe that’s a good thing. Some flower scents bring allergy reactions.
My friend gave me two clivia plants, in hopes that one of them will be yellow. The second one is a smaller, younger plant than this one that is blooming. It doesn’t show any signs of sending up a bloom yet. It may take another year.
Rusty didn't want to move.
You may be familiar with the Internet site, Stuff on My Cat. After I’d see that, I tried it with my dogs. At that time I had Desy and Rusty. Neither of them would allow anything to stay on them. They would immediately shake it off.
Then one day my son and I were in the back room by the file cabinet and Rusty was with us. Perhaps I wanted to open the lower drawer and he had stuck his head into that little space under the file cabinet and didn’t want to move. I thought that if I put something on him, he would immediately get up and shake it off. But he didn’t. He just stayed there and I kept piling little things on him. Finally I realized I should get a picture of him with “stuff” on him.
Eventually he had enough and did move but I got this picture of him. And looking at it took my mind off the winter weather for a few minutes.
About two years ago, give or take, my elderly friend, Bill, gave me a clivia. I had never heard of nor seen a clivia before. It has long, tapered leaves. After a period of dormancy, it sends up a spike of flower, a gorgeous flower.
Some months after he gave me the plant, Bill had a stroke. He had to leave his home and become a resident at the local nursing home. I would visit him there. We got into a routine Friday afternoon visit. Each time I would visit Bill would ask me if my plant had bloomed yet. It didn’t. Last year, a month or so before he died, he stopped asking me if the plant had bloomed. I always felt bad to have to tell him that it hadn’t bloomed.
He died just before Easter last year. I visit another friend, Anne, at that nursing home and I still miss going to room 15 to visit Bill with Anne. We three had lively conversations and often enjoyed hearty laughter. Good memories.
A little over a week ago, I discovered that my clivia has started to push up a bloom spike. I am so pleased that it is blooming. I called Bill’s daughter to let her know that my clivia is beginning to bloom. She was as tickled as I am. She said, “Dad talked to me a lot about that plant he gave you and he was so eager for it to bloom.” How I wish I could step into room 15 and tell Bill that the clivia is blooming, but I was glad that I could tell his daughter. He hoped it would be a yellow one, but it is orange. However, it promises to be beautiful.
Bill was so happy to give me the plant. It is more blessed to give than to receive but it’s pretty good to receive. I’m especially grateful to have received this gift of the clivia. This picture shows the bloom all closed up. Some of it is now beginning to show the orange tinge, which wasn’t showing when I took this picture. I hope I can get a good picture to share with you when it fully blooms.
We finished the puzzle on Monday evening. There is one piece missing but it doesn’t show in this picture. At first we thought there were two pieces missing but then we discovered one of them laying on the completed puzzle in the right foreground. It blended right in and we didn’t notice it there. We never found the other piece and we don’t know if we lost it while we were working on the puzzle or if it had been lost years ago. It wouldn’t surprise me if we lost it. We dropped puzzle pieces occasionally, but we thought we had discovered them each time we lost them. However, it certainly would be possible that we dropped one and didn’t notice it.
The last quarter of the puzzle work went much faster than the beginning of it. For a while, I thought it was because we were getting better at puzzles, but then I realized it was because there were so many fewer pieces to work with.
It gives a sense of accomplishment to complete a puzzle like this.
Snow in the parking lot.
We have had tons of snow in our area. The snow season started early, at the end of October, and we’ve had one snowstorm after another and the snow has built up around us, higher and higher. Right now the weather is a little warmer and we haven’t had new snow for several days. The snow is shrinking and its edges are grimy with road dirt but in fields and yards, the snow is still very deep.
The picture shows how the snow has accumulated. My friend is standing in front of a huge snow bank, in a place where the land is actually flat and level behind him. The snow bank towers above him. He is standing in a parking lot and the snowplows have pushed the snow into this huge mound. This was two weeks ago. Most of that snow is still there, but today it looks grimy instead of snowy white.
It’s so good to have warmer weather the last couple of days, but weather is still a big topic of conversation for us.