Red Amy

Addmirable Woman has a mascot!  Her name is Red Amy and this is her story.   She is a red amaryllis that bloomed gorgeously for me in December 2006, and January '07, and February, and after the magnificent blooms were gone, went on to produce long elegant leaves for almost a year before gasping her last - or so I  thought. Being a typical ADDmirable woman, it can take me awhile to get around to things like taking brown plants out to the compost bin, so she  was left to sleep behind a curtain in my living room.   

A couple of weeks before this past Christmas I trotted off to Canadian Tire to buy a new amaryllis.  An older gentleman saw me staring at the bulb display and came over. He was, it seems, an expert on amaryllis bulbs, and told me the secret of how to trick them into thinking they've just endured a cold spell in their native Africa.  As per his kindly advice, I went straight home, found my sleeping bulb, dropped her into a brown paper bag and put her in the veggie crisper in the bottom of my fridge.

It didn't seem possible that anything green and living could come from this, but two months later I brought the bulb out, put her back in her bowl, watered, and waited. About this same time I was getting equally sage advice on how to start a blog.  (Am I the only person who dislikes that word, blog?  It sounds like something caught in your throat, right.)  I was having equal doubts about being able to launch something viable that I could share with other ADD women.  

For a week I struggled to understand and master the intricacies of designing this site while staring at the unchanging brown bulb on the window sill in front of me.  Eight days into it, I finally hit the "publish" button.  I looked over, and there were two little green leaf tips poking through the top of the bulb!

As my red amaryllis grows, so does this blog.  So here's to the power of growing things as yet unseen in all our lives.  What's your Red Amy?