Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Plant me as a goldenseal upon your hearth.

Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2004
9:59 p.m.
When I was coming back from getting the mail today I saw the most beautiful dragonfly. It was enormous, iridiscent blue, and took its time flying past me. Truly lovely.

Otherwise, it has been a computer day. I tried practising, but sounded so horrible in my own ears that I had to stop. Tomorrow will be better, at least this is what I have to keep telling myself. I copied several pages of symphony, chatted with friends in different time zones (the internet still amazes me as an expedient to interchronal [is that even a word?] conversation) and hung a load of laundry too late in the day to dry, so that it is still out there. Hopefully there will be no rain tonight, otherwise I am grateful that I have a dryer.

There is one blossom on my brugmansia ready to open. It is the funniest flowering process. First a pod sprouts from the stem pointing straight up. As it get bigger, its stem bends and it droops. The pod then splits and the flower starts extruding from it. This is taking days. I am hoping that by tomorrow or the next day there will be a beautiful salmon-coloured angel trumpet hanging from my little tree. It really is little, only about waist high, my waist.

The nursery where I bought it has several enormous specimens on display, full-grown trees covered with gorgeous flowers. Chuck told me I could pot it and take it inside for the winter, which is obviously what they do or they would not attain such a great size, and keep it for years. I shall do that. He said it could be like a pet. He doesn�t know how many �pets� I have already in my house.

Right now I have the fewest plants I think I have ever had, since many of them met their doom in the past couple of years. I have two lemon trees, one enormous hibiscus (it�s amazing what good soil and fertilizer will do), five specimens of cornplant (this includes yuccas and their kin), an African violet, a poinsettia which turns red anytime but when it�s supposed to, several philodendra hanging around the house, two peace lilies�one pot-bound which desperately needs separating and one of its offspring�a Christmas cactus which started out in life as a wee cutting when we left Brandon in 1986, a blue jasmine which refuses to flower, a sickly-looking begonia, a dwarfed grapefruit, a lychee seedling (which I started myself) and the requisite aloe vera plant. There is also a chunk of a dieffenbachia I picked out of the garbage standing in water, not rooting, but seemingly happy nonetheless.

In the past I had a potted papyrus which I finally allowed to die outside on the deck last winter, an oleander which was once a beautiful plant but ended up feigning death one too many times, more lemon trees (they start in the compost), a couple of lime trees which I amazingly started from seed but which sadly did not thrive, various avocado trees over the years, and a Norfolk Island Pine which had been with me since undergraduate days. It simply gave up the ghost. The catalogue is complete.

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