Fiction Daily

Here we are, mid-week already, and there’s no sign the work obligations are letting up. It’s been some time now since I’ve worked on the novel … been in the river with it so to speak … but when the current kicks up, you just have to swim.

Meanwhile, an interesting health note today. A new study shows a link between alcohol consumption and making truthful observations about alcohol.

While I don’t espouse making booze illegal, we can agree that it’s a toxin and worse, a highly addictive substance that ruins people. They lose jobs, then their personalities change, then their minds go and eventually their bodies.

Granted, there are some people who can enjoy a drink every now and again, and are fine. Still others enjoy wine tasting and characterization. Those pleasures are precious and very human.

Still when dealing with any kind of alcohol, it’s important to understand what we’re dealing with — a highly powerful substance that can do harm.

In a separate observation, someone is unleashing its bad ‘bots on this blog again. Bad, bad ‘bots!

Almost like a frisson going through the large universal human soul, everything is crunching and reordering. Waves around the world today of happenings that stem from our country’s economic crisis; scandals, fears and business scale-backs.

Human beings seem to bounce back from horrible, terrible times — our World Wars, genocides, apartheid, slavery. It takes a long time for us to realize the sin of our behaviors, and usually we won’t stop until someone threatens us with hardship, imprisonment or death. Or, we see the horror of what we’ve done and someone helps us see a way out of darkness. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln.

Slavery sent this nation into Civil War; World War II stopped fascism.

In our world this morning, there is unbridled greed, which allowed the most powerful nation on earth to become a big fat Atlantic City gameroom.

Good, honest people were suckered in by adjustable rate mortgages, with pie-in-the-sky promises that they could flip their house and make a bundle before the rate jumped. Now, they’re sitting in … or losing … homes they owe more on than they’re worth.

Meanwhile, million-dollar salaries among CEOs created an upper tier of wealth and power, and removed moral constraints.

So we wait and watch for the dust to settle after this whirlwind of change, and wait for the light after the storm.

Shutting the blinds to close out the day last night, I noticed something unexpected.

Our bougainvillea, a crawling bloomer that’s native to Florida, sits on a table by the eastern kitchen window. Each fall it comes in to join the peace lilies and philodendron, then struggles, day after day, to stay alive until May or June, when I take it outside again to flourish.

We’ve had this plant for nearly five years, I suppose. My husband chose it to hang on the new trellis we built several years ago, planning to hang it from the cross boards.

We liked it so much we brought it to the front yard, where it hangs each summer on a shepherd’s hook.

When it comes in each autumn, the first thing it does is shed its leaves to ease the stress of coming into a dry house environment. There it sits for weeks, bare, mere sticks, to all appearances dead.

Then slowly, as the weeks go by, I’ll see tiny sprouts on the stems, and soon, leaves push through.

Sometimes, there’s more, and yesterday, it happened: the bougainvillea was starting to bloom.

The sepals are pale red, not the deep crimson they’ll be in the summer, but there they are, nonetheless.

Bougainvillea blooms. Doing their best, despite the odds.

If you’ve ever spent time with plants, you can’t help becoming affected by them. Plants have such courage, resilience, and strength. They are so generous — sharing nectar with bees and birds; color and pollen with butterflies; food and joy for us human beings.

Whenever I see the color of a blossom, it’s almost jarring to see such gorgeous life expression.

I gaze and wonder, and remind myself that in this mysterious world of miracles, one thing is certain: Everything blooms.