Resurrection

Yesterday, I looked out my dining room window and noticed a flame of green where a few days ago there had been none.

One of our sego palms—a long-lost sego palm—had sprouted new fronds. A surprise, since I had long ago decided this particular sego had not survived the winter. This past winter, while on the whole relatively mild, had ended with a brutal cold snap that paralyzed our city under a layer of ice, and froze many of the plants in our garden down to the roots.

We have three segos, all offspring of a towering palm that grows next to my parents’ back porch in New Orleans. After the ice storm, all three of our transplants had turned brown and wilted, the frostbitten leaves scattering and the stems of the branches rotting away, leaving only dark stumps in the soil.

For two of the segos, near-death had been brief — after a month or two they began to send up new growth, and since then have slowly been coming back as summer took hold. But this last one shriveled and slumped under the composting pine straw in our garden, and, I thought, was gone for good.

But yesterday, there they were, a pair of tender green fronds pushing through the straw layer and reaching into the summer humidity. Healthy, vivid, alive.

Just goes to show that things despaired of can make a comeback, and at the least expected time.

There’s a spiritual lesson to be told here.

But rather than tell it, I’ll let nature speak for herself.