An Unreasonable Flower

Today I was startled by the appearance of a truly pretty flower. 

Startled, you say?  Well, I really should begin by explaining that my yard is overgrown.  Very overgrown.  It is the sort of overgrowth that does not come from the mild carelessness of missing mowing a time or two, nor is it the sort of overgrowth that results from the failure to rake away stray tree seedlings amongst the fallen leaves in the autumn.  No, this is overgrowth of the worst sort--the kind that comes from being legitimately unable to clear the yard for many years at a time.  It is overgrowth from neglect. 

At the front of the lot, which hasn't been cared for in about a dozen years, there is a solid stand of yellow pine grown all on its own.  Given another half decade, it could even be ready for harvest as pulpwood, if anyone would be willing to cut less than an acre.  The yard in front of the house has suffered alone for five years and is covered in such a thick growth of prickly wild berry vines that it is impossible to traverse.  The face of the house itself is covered by other vining plants that reach halfway up the large living room windows and that cover the front door.  The backyard, having been mowed once in the last three years, is less bad but still in undeniably poor shape.  To say the very least, my acreage is the world gone wild.  Mostly I don't mind; although the neighbors don't say much, I'm aware that they dislike it.  

Wildflowers come up wherever they may during the appropriate seasons: white violets in the late winter and early spring, berry flowers in the late spring, various wild asters in summer, and, gloriously, in autumn there is an massive array of everything purple and golden--daisies and boneset and ageratum and meadow beauty and more.  But nowhere in my yard is there a planting of traditional flowers, unless you count a few straggeldy untended azaleas that fail entirely to bloom properly in season but do so whenever they feel like it and that is inevitably out of season.  

There is no tended or cared-for flowering here.  No annuals, no perennials, no bulbs.  My parents were no gardeners, and (despite some half-hearted container vegetable farming) neither am I.  As I have lived here for more than thirty years without giving great heed to planting flowers, I am still observant of what thrives locally so  I know what grows here and what doesn't.  Today I saw something that had no business here:  it appears to be an amaryllis.

As happy as I was to see the pretty face of the flowers, I was more entranced by the questions of why and how.  Why?  Why is it here?  It is a bulb plant; those only grow where they are planting and they don't just come up unexpectedly in some untidy forgotten place.  How?  How did it get here?  I just don't know.

I know how fish turn up in brand-new unseeded ponds.  (They arrive as eggs caught on the legs of water birds flying from one pond to another.)  I know about volunteer trees.  (Their seeds get caught on the wind or they travel while in the gut of an animal who poops them out later in some other locale.)  I know things like this.  But I do not know and cannot explain why or how a bulb plant should suddenly arise out of nowhere.

Still, it's not good to question a miracle too closely, is it?  For now, I'll make my mind up to just enjoy gazing at the pretty salmon-pink flowers while they bloom.

Life is good.

And it's surprising, too.