Irises: Shape-shifters and Magical Reinventors

"In grocery stores iris buds are bundled together, like perfectly sharpened purple-pointed pencils, like slender indigo-edged spears, like a quiver of Spring arrows poised to unbend unhappy bents of mind. Take a sheaf home, place it in a glass vase and by morning, from poised purple-tipped silence, spill sepals and petals frothy with filaments and ruffles, loquacious little fountains self-released into sunshine, newly aware of the greater world. An iris in a bud understandably assumes the bud is the world. An iris outside its bud is suddenly adrift. Its erstwhile home is gone, irretrievable, like misspent youth or last Wednesday's sunset. Yet this turn of events does little to disturb an iris's equanimity. Unlike many mortals, irises are not unsettled by dramatic changes in circumstance. Perhaps this is because they cradle memories of their ancestors, who fell asleep in autumnal earth as knobbly rhizomes or bulbous bulbs, only to dream and wake some seasons later, tall, slender, studded with purple possibilities, and brandishing green leaves like pirate swords."

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