Late Night Bloomer   Bookseller cultivates a night-blooming cereus after hours…

Sometime in the midst of that torrential downpour mid-last week, short-lived, but intense, we lost the three-inch bud on the cutting. It wasn’t likely to last, but the effort of that portion of the plant, cut too early, to reproduce, is impressive. It’s something like the reverse of remembered limb syndrome…Here the amputated part may “remember” the whole body of the plant. Or the cutting is so full of the life-force regardless of its connection to the mother plant that it stretches forward, no matter what.

Blanca blooms in the midst of whatever’s going on in our life. Last week I estimated she’d bloom tonight, Thursday, and I considered transporting her to a friend’s dinner in Noyac, or of inviting that dinner party to transplant itself around Blanca in Bay Point.  But the bud was lengthening more rapidly. I thought she might bloom on Wednesday when the kids would be visiting. How lovely, I thought, for them to see it. But it’s a late night kind of affair, and these are little ones, ages 4, 7 and 9…Would she captivate them? What appears like rapid blooming to adults may be just a slow, boring expanse of white to a child up too late past her bedtime. Those questions weren’t to be answered as the bud was growing at slightly more than one inch per day. She would bloom not on Thursday for the dinner party, nor on Wednesday for the nieces and nephew’s visit, but she would bloom on Tuesday, for the writing students.

This summer’s writing workshop is titled “The Single Effect”, what Edgar Allen Poe meant by calling for every element of a short story to contribute to the “single effect” of the work on the reader. Here was Blanca, pouring her heart out into this one single flower that remained on the plant just now. Every effort of her soaking up water and nutrients would spread into that glorious flower that would open on the night of our third class meeting.  So a last minute pizza- and- wine supper was hastily arranged. “It’s like a birth,” said one.  We sat around the table with our slices chatting excitedly, then we’d step outside, wine glasses in hand, where Blanca would be quietly dilating. It was a cool evening, the moon a waning gibbous, one singular white orb in the sky pulling at one white flower on the deck, in singular harmony, and the students like petals around the center.