Legs not like Orchids

I like orchid plants. I have a sunroom in my house where they seem to thrive without much attention from me. Russ has caught on to this fact and so an orchid plant is his go to last minute gift since he can just call up Family Garden and they will deliver it. One of the things I like most about orchids is the lack of attention they need. I water them all just once a week and when they start blooming they stay in flower for months on end.

Today while I was enjoying the good light in the sunroom needlepointing I looked around at most of the plants and they were looking mighty poorly. I know there are other things I should do with these plants, like repotting them, but quite frankly I hate to mess with success since they seem to eventually come back.

What I did not like was the fact that most of the plants are not in flower right now and they have a bunch of lanky sticks that once held dozens of blooms, just sticking up like skinny legs in the air. They reminded me of the legs of a new born colt, or a very tall skinny adolescent girl who had grown six inches over a summer and not gained an ounce.

How funny that I dislike those thin stick like legs on the plants. All my life all I ever wanted were those skinny legs like Susan Dey from the Partridge Family had. When I was in boarding school I used to think that my legs could compete as telephone poles.

At my last boarding school reunion my friend Karen Polcer handed out pictures she had come across from our senior skip day 35 years before. Mine was an unattractive shot of me standing freezing on a beach in my jeans. I looked at the picture and although it is not a great shot my first thought was, “My legs were not as bad as my mind remembered.” Of course they had gotten much worse over the years, but I don’t remember hating them as much when they actually were telephone poles as I did when they were just normal.

Looking at the spent orchid stalks today I thought, “Why did I ever want legs that were so thin and spindly they could not hold me up?” That thinness is just not that attractive. Of course I am not an orchid. I doubt I could hold a bloom for six months straight, but I am thankful that I have finally come to like the imperfections I was given. I will never have thin legs, but they get me where I need to go and isn’t that what is important?