Our now-non-holiday cactus has decided to grace us with a smattering of blooms, long before we could even consider it an Easter cactus, and so far removed from Thanksgiving or Christmas that it gives up any chance of holiday affiliation. I don’t appreciate it any less, however; in fact, it may have sensed our wish for spring, and flowers, and any glimpse of hope in this gray and barren world, and thus delivered a show out of sync with any human-sanctioned holiday. Those are often the best shows anyway – the unexpected, the unhyped, the unpredicted. The reminder that life is so often a whim that defies planning or expectation. I need to heed that lesson more, to embrace the moment at hand and not attempt to set some rigid outline of what’s going to happen. That takes up way too much space in the brain, and my brain needs what little space remains just to get me through the damn day.
