Arnold Zwicky's Blog

… did shake the darling buds of …

FEBRUARY.

This morning: big windstorm, driving rains, temperature falling even further than before (highs in the 40s today).

Misery for me. Two days ago I was wheezing and barely able to talk (glad I wasn’t teaching this quarter). I’ve been holing up at home, going out as little as possible, but still it hurts to breathe. I hate it.

Meanwhile, this is spring flower time. Some of it happened on time: the first flowering fruit trees bloomed on time in the middle of January, and new ones have been coming along every so often (pollen coats the windshield of my car). The narcissus are already over.

But the pittosporum (Victorian box), which normally scent the air with an intense perfume of orange blossoms in mid-February, still haven’t bloomed. (There’s a stand of them just across the street from my front door, and I miss their spring scent.)

On the other hand, my cymbidium orchids, showy winter-flowering plants, started blooming around Thanksgiving and are happy indeed with the wet and cold, so they will certainly last into June. They are are a great pleasure.

The first of them, a birthday present from me to Jacques in January 1986 (photo by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky):

(After that I got him another one — many colors, some big, some miniature, etc. — every January, divided them every so often (you do it with a hatchet or a saw, remarkably crude operation), and then added some as a gesture of love after he went into the dementia care facility and, eventually, died. I can see them out the window as I write this.)

This entry was posted on February 25, 2011 at 5:00 pm and is filed under My life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.