We tried something different in the garden, this summer: we planted something.
After that, something even more unusual happened — it grew!
What we planted was a sunflower, a gift from a neighbor with a green thumb. My own thumb is resolutely black, which may explain why this whole experience is so new to me.
Not only did this transplant refuse to die, but for whatever reason — perhaps the tender loving care it received from a teenager as his last hoorah before going off to college — it grew. And grew. And grew!
I had never realized, before, what a truly amazing thing it is for a 10-foot sunflower to grow out of the earth and stand there, higher than my head, (higher than two of me, really) all by itself! And from a tiny seed smaller than my pinkie-nail!
Every day I check on and water it, I am overcome with a seldom-used sense of wonder. It is magical! And finally, I realize that this must have been the real-life inspiration for Jack’s Magic Beanstalk. (And before you suggest perhaps the inspiration was real-life beanstalks, don’t bother — we had those too, and there was nothing magical about them except how soon they shriveled up after we picked the three beans they produced.)
Compared with the magic involved in growing this plant at all, I think that having a giant climb down it would be small potatoes — or perhaps I should say, small change. (Potatoes would be even more amazing, since we didn’t plant any.)
It makes me look around and think: perhaps there really is magic, in the world around me.
Certainly something is going on with our blackberry bush — or vine, really — another legacy of the gardener who is now at college.
It has done nothing but elongate itself, stretching multiple feet both left and right from where it was planted, until now it encompasses almost the entire back of the house. Still no sign of blackberries, however. Either this thing thinks it’s the plant-world version of Rapunzel (only much less useful, as it doesn’t help the prince climb anywhere and it’s full of prickles), or it’s a vegetarian boa constrictor, which is planning to squeeze our house to death.
I’m hoping for the latter; maybe it will pop up a third floor for us.
At the moment, there isn’t really a third floor, just an attic, full of plastic tubs of winter clothing. Soon, I will have to bring them down and awaken them from their slumber.
It’s my version of Sleeping Beauty, except everything smells of mothballs.
The only problem is, Sleeping Beauty did not shrink in her sleep, whereas apparently my entire wardrobe did. Who knew mothballs could do that?
My favorite fairy tale is the one where a miller boasts to the King that his daughter can spin straw into gold.
She can’t, of course; but she is locked into a room full of nothing but straw and a spinning wheel, and must either turn the straw to gold by morning, or lose her life. (Sometimes, with a deadline approaching, I feel her pain.)
Her father the miller, apparently, will survive unscathed. Nobody said these stories were fair.
The miller’s daughter is saved when a gremlin appears and offers to spin the gold for her, but only in return for her first-born child… unless she can guess his name. It ends up being a very close call, but in the nick of time, she discovers that it’s Rumpelstiltskin.
Of course we know that — it’s the only name we know in the entire story.
But I can’t help thinking of this tale, every time I try to guess my own computer password.
Or my email password. Or the PIN word for my bank account, or my credit cards, or … well, you get the picture.
The difference, of course, is that I have given all these entities their names, myself, in the first place…and still I can’t remember them.
So the whole adventure is far more pointless — and more hopeless — than just owing my firstborn to a gremlin. (And no, the password isn’t Rumpelstiltskin; I already tried that.)
In the old days, the first-born (and the second-born) used to rescue me, themselves; but now that they’re both in college, I am going to need another solution.
In my version of the story, the girl marries Rumpelstiltskin; and since he knows all the passwords to all of her machines, they both manage to live happily ever after!
