Saturday, February 2, 2019

My Year of Orchids: If bugs are singing should the orchids be resting?

So I am walking down my street at 8:30 PM and the Pinellas Point neighborhood is dead silent except for the crickets. There is life and warmth and humidity at this rare spot here at the end of January! We expect severe storms tonight as a potent cold front moves through but for now it is still and peaceful and languid.

I walked my friend home the three or four blocks to her house and as we rounded the corner of our street we saw Robert and Scott on their way home from dinner with Bobby’s mother at Po Folks. I asked them to stop in to say hi to Janet. We are a quiet tight knit neighborhood and checking in with one another u the way we do things.

So, if the insects are singing should the orchids be sleeping? Is there a “rule“ to dictate the answer to this question? Are there experts who can share their knowledge about a given species in a given tree on a given night? Today it was warm and breezy. Tonight it will be stormy and windy. Tomorrow there will be rain and the temperature will cool down for the next week. What was the right way to treat the orchids today?

We had tiny twins who had just begun to walk where we took them from San Francisco to Mazatlan on the west coast of Mexico. We didn’t like the place we were staying in Mazatlan and we didn’t like the vibes so we asked the front desk where we could go that would be a little bit off the beaten path. We found ourselves on a multi hour bus ride to a fork in the road that led down to the Pacific coast, to a village called San Blas. A good ten or twelve people got off the bus in the rain and cold. A taxi drew up and greeted us and somehow all of us, our tiny twins included, piled into that taxi.

The ten miles or so downhill to San Blas were rainy and dark, even though it was the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the tropics. All around us was tropical forest. But it was cold! What were the orchids going that day?

No comments:

Post a Comment