Enforced Secret Joy #23 – The Overgrown Poinsettia Bush In My Backyard

So my gardening knowledge is limited to Plant, Pour Miracle Grow, Water, Then Take Pictures, but Roomie Jekyll’s gardening knowledge is even worse, consisting of Stick It In The Backyard Where Amy’s A Watering Fiend Because I Really Don’t Have Time To Take Care Of This, The Most Craptastic Of Christmas Gifts.

So somewhere around two years ago, she stuck her standard potted Christmas Poinsettia Plant in the backyard, and I dutifully watered it, because it was on the way to watering the yellow roses, and the other pink flower bush that I don’t know the name of. I fully expected it to die, because don’t all Poinsettias die at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve? Isn’t that how it goes? And if we don’t like the fact that the neighborhood cats use our backyard as a flophouse for naughty kitty nocturnal activities, no worries, because they’ll eat the Poinsettia leaves and die because Poinsettias are poisonous, right? Right?

Wrong.

Here is Roomie Jekyll’s Poinsettia bush. I include the barbecue and lawn chair as reference points to prove that the bush is now over five feet tall. Man, the flowers around my house sure are tenacious buggers, aren’t they? They care. They care a lot.

Dear God, thank you for the overgrown Poinsettia bush. Thank you for its tenacity, its stubbornness, its deep red Christmasy blooms. Thank you for the fact that, contrary to popular belief they are not poisonous at all. Which is a good thing, because it would’ve been difficult to explain to the neighbors why there might have been up to five dead cats in our backyard resembling a feline Jonestown cult. Thank you for that not happening, because as hard as it is to explain that their cats ate the poinsettia bush, it would’ve been even squirmier to explain that their cats were there in the first place because they like having yowling kitty sex in our backyard. Hey, are cats allowed to have premarital sex in Your eyes? They can just skate on by with that one, huh? Doesn’t seem quite fair.

But thank you for no dead cats, for no poisonous Poinsettia bushes, and the peculiar ways of this particular Poinsettia bush, which of course lives in my backyard. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Amen.