Good Morning. With spring arriving and summer on its way, I thought I would share with you this pastel painting I did from a photograph of this splendid cactus one night last summer. This plant is ugly most of the time. It has awkward limbs and fat, flat leaves and strange shoots that are skinny with no leaves and just grow taller and taller. They make me think of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The first year I warily watched it grow bigger and tried treating it kindly, watering and fertilizing it as if it were a lovely rose or sweet smelling lilac. It began to put forth little brown knobs on the flat leaves. These knobs grew until they became some kind of wiry, spidery closed bud. Then one night, as we wandered in the garden, we looked over and the bud had burst open! There, was the most beautiful white bloom resembling a chrysantheum but much bigger. It was like a burst of white fireworks! The next day it was dead. You see, the bud only blooms one night. All that ugliness, all that twisting, all those weird shoots result in one night of glory. Other blooms followed. Now, some years later, we have rooted several and, one night, sometime in the summer, there will be white fireworks in the garden again. The moral to this story, if there is one, is that maybe appearances are deceiving. Maybe, behind or within something we consider ugly, there is beauty beyond belief. Thanks for tuning in.
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