The amaryllis in the white pot near the living room window is sporting a tiny green leaf coming up from the middle of the dried-up bulb like a snowdrop emerging from the cold earth. Snowdrops are always the first flower to brace the winter cold here and herald the long-awaited spring. Although spring is still a long way off.
But now my amaryllis is coming back to life for its annual regeneration. Thirteen years ago, my aunt Ina gave me an amaryllis bulb at the tail end of December. I never gotten one before and was uncertain as to how to get them to grow and bloom. It seemed a desiccated lifeless brown thing and I wondered how and what life could lie dormant in that bulb.
But in a couple of weeks at the cusp of February, it bloomed. It only needed a little water and a warm place in our living room. It’s redness once emerged brought me great joy. Until it withered, far too soon and the leaves turned to mushy strings that I threw on the compost heap.
Unsure what to do, I let the pot stand near the window. My mom asked me several times over the course of that year:
“Do you want me to throw it out? It’s dead.”
I replied:
“No, thank you. I am keeping it a little longer.”
I did not want to chuck out this gift, but I was unsure what to do with it. It seemed a waste give someone a blub for a one-off flowering. But in our ‘throw-out-and-buy-new’ instead of ‘repair-and-reuse’ world, it would have been par for the course. I held out, not wanting to throw it away. I wanted to see where it led.
Then I forgot about the bulb. Occasionally, I splashed a drop of water in the pot while watering the banana leaf tree and indestructible ficus plants – living with me for over 20 and 30 years – in the windowsill, hoping against hope that someday the bulb would come to life again, as life tends to be cyclical.
As I went about my daily life, the year turned full circle and February came around in the new year. Out of the corner of my eye while watering the other hardy plants that call my house their home, I spotted a tiny green nub that turned into a tiny leaf sprouting up from the dead bulb in days. I doubled my occasional moderate splashes of water until the leaves were long and curved over the pot like hair flowing over shoulders of a young girl until the flower appeared. A sign of unexpected hope and colour rising up in the midst of winter. I was vindicated. I had held out and was rewarded with a flower once again. Hope had won.
Sometimes we just have to keep hope alive somewhere deep in the earth and in our hearts. Burrowed in the deep lie the seeds of renewal and change. Since then, my amaryllis has bloomed every February without fail. And still, every year my mom says:
“Do you want me to throw it out? It’s dead.”
“No, thank you. I am keeping it a little longer,” I reply every year.
Let’s keep hope alive, like my amaryllis.