Good times

My calla lily is in bloom. This is unusual. Every year that I plant flowers, I plant a calla lily in a ½-barrel near the southwestern corner of my deck. It is a shady spot. I usually plant trailing flowers around it, to cascade down the sides of the barrel. Lately those have been red begonias and white bacopa. All of these are annuals where I live. They die in the frost.

In the spring, I buy a calla lily that is in bloom. They stay in bloom a good while. Even after the bloom is gone, the plant continues to grow big green leaves, and is tall—to contrast with the trailing flowers. Then winter comes, and in a hard freeze the calla lily dies. The next spring I throw it out and plant a new one. In the many years I’ve lived her, one year I thought the calla lily had died and I planted a new one, then the old one rose from its ashes (its bulb or rhizome or whatever) and grew right by the new one.

This winter, the calla lily has not died, and now it’s in bloom in January already. We could still get more freezes and snow before spring, but right now it’s like early spring.

My sweet box is also blooming. That’s a bush with green leaves all year round. It’s other name is sarcococca, but sweet box sounds nicer, doesn’t it? It gets tiny white blooms that are sweetly fragrant. Just walking by, you get the heady scent. When I first moved here from California, I thought it must be some kind of jasmine, but it’s not. But if you know jasmine, then you have some idea what it’s like.

My dog is adorable. Generally, I’m not one to put clothes on a dog, but being so very chihuahua, my puppy feels the cold. She likes to burrow into quilts and sweaters that I have lying around. In fact, yeah, that’s why they’re lying around. (Ahem.) Anyway, I did buy her some clothes to shield her from the cold, and my favorite is a pink cable-knit sweater. 

The first time I put it on her, she kept shaking and shaking herself. Not trembling in the chihuahua fashion, which she does do fairly often, but shaking herself like all dogs do. After I stopped paying attention to her for a while, and then looked at her again, she had managed to remove it by herself. But the next time she wore it, she was more accepting.

Today is the birthday of a beloved family member. I won’t call her out by name because she might not like that, but my family knows who she is. She is a dear and loving person.

And those are the important happenings in my world on this January 20th, 2021.