Forsythia

A few weeks ago Marissa randomly came home from Aldi with with a forsythia bush.  It was just a tiny little start in a plastic bag, only cost a couple of bucks, and she was excited about how they'd look in the yard.  Problem was, I was busy with other things at the time - the vegetable garden, the patio, the lawn.  So I neglected it.  I think the best use it got was being dragged out into the yard by Buckley and used as a chew toy.  

A week or so passed, and I found the start out in the yard, the victim of Buckley's love.  As the dirt limply fell away from what used to be to roots, the plant looked like little more than a dead stick.  Marissa and I had a "discussion" about when and where to buy plants, having a plan for them, and so on.  Feeling slightly guilty about my neglect, I found an old plastic pot and tossed some dirt in there with the plant, just to see what would happen.  I didn't have much hope for it, though, and didn't give the plant much more thought, let alone water.

Weeks later we're home from the hospital.  I wake up on our first morning here, with Joel and Gerry asleep and Marissa quietly pumping.  There are pepper plants outside that need planting, and that I hope have survived their own neglect over the weekend.  Outside, I find Andrea or Keith had cared for them, so I start working.

When I walk by the left-for-dead forsythia, I stop.  It's mostly still a stick in a pot, a sad sight, looking like it could an artist's commentary on the state of society.  Except for the leaves.  At the top of this stick in a pot, fresh, light green little leaves are sprouting.  Despite the neglect and abuse it had been through, not getting nourished in nearly the way it was meant to, this little guy is growing.

Who knows what this bush will look like in a week, a month, a year?  It might do as I would have predicted weeks ago, dying off.  Maybe it will miraculously bloom into a glorious forsythia, just what we thought we were getting.  Or perhaps it will be somewhere in between.  With some effort, it might grow into something that we weren't expecting but that, because of that effort, I will be so much more proud of.

It's amazing at times like these how the mind finds meaning in the world around us.  I'm going outside now to water the forsythia.