Queen of the Night Party

This is my night blooming cereus. Reed and I wanted her because at Carole’s we had seen her mother bloom. She put out this most amazing fragrance and was the most amazing plant. She was tall and commanding this flowering ceroid cacti. This happens once a year. I have had her for 17 years. She has not always had an easy time of propagation. She started in a bag with a wet paper towel moving from my best friend Carole’s house in Connecticut to Illinois briefly before moving to Wyoming. While she was in a jar sprouting roots for months she moved to a planter and started to grow, very slowly. On the trip to Pennsylvania she was again placed in a bag with roots and soil and water and had to survive the trip. She almost didn’t survive the trip from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, where she was in a truck for a week hidden in a box without light. She has been repotted as she grown. But in 17 years, she has never had a bud. She has never bloomed or blossomed. She has just lived in her pot. This year, this spring, she is going to bloom. She is going to sometime in the next few weeks spread open her petals and fill the air with fragrance. I don’t know what color she will be, most are white with maybe a pale shade, she has a hint of pink. But she will open and be glorious for one night and by morning she will have wilted .

17 years I have been waiting for this. 17. This will be her chance to shine and yet I am the only one who will get to see her in person. I can’t host a queen of the night (princess of the night, Christ in the manger, dama de noche) party for her, because all of us are spatial distancing and confined to home. None of you will be able to smell her fragrance and wonder at her gift.

And yet, she is exactly what I need this year, in this moment. She started blossoming as I was forced into spatial distancing. She is a promise of something amazing and special to come. This year she is like the promise of Easter. We know that Jesus’ last week on earth, was full of pain, challenge and heartbreak. He is deserted, rejected and denied by those closest to him. He is put on trial and executed. This Covid-19 pandemic has been a fraught and emotional time for us. Some of us are worried and fearful. We are worried about our families who have to go to work or are so far away that if something happens to them we won’t be able to see them. We are worried about money, what will this crisis mean for our income and our retirement funds. We are worried that we will catch this terribly contagious disease. But what Easter Promises us is that Good Friday will not last forever. There will be a dark time, there will be sorrow and pain. There will be death and illness. And we are going to have to sit in this pain for longer than we like. We are most likely going to have to miss celebrating Easter on the calendar day. But what Jesus’ story teaches us, is that Friday and the pain of Friday are not the last word. There will be a dawn of Easter morning and what we are afraid of will have passed and a new creation will be brought forth. And that day. We will celebrate. We will hug and laugh and sing. We will speak of our sorrow but rejoice in our salvation. We will again sing Alleluia, God be Praised, for Christ is Risen. We will smell that magnificent fragrance and watch that bloom and experience the new creation in our midst.