Such a pretty flower.

Actually, they bloom pretty much all the time around here.  There is, however, a brief few weeks when they die back and look all brown and scraggly.  Then, their foliage turns green again.

And then!

All of a sudden!

Flowers!

Mine look like this, all orange and white.

Where yesterday there was nothing but green leaves, today there are exuberant open blooms.  And I hear Katharine Hepburn’s voice in my head:

The canna lilies are in bloom again.  Such a strange flower!

In that odd, magnificent, Connecticut Yankee, Hepburn voice.  (The line is actually “calla lilies,” but who are you to quibble with the voices I hear in my head?)

The cannas are not strange except in so far as I have not killed any of them yet.  (Not much of a green thumb.  I may have mentioned it.)  I haven’t even been able to kill the ones I’ve tried.

My cannas are meant to be tastefully confined to the flowerbeds within their concrete borders.  A few of them didn’t get the memo.

I mow them down.  They come back up.  I dig them up.  They sprout again.  They are an unrestrained flower, if not strange.

But, I am thankful, thankful, thankful for something that blooms far beyond my poor power to ignore, neglect and actively thwart it.  I have blossoms out my office window for at least six months of the year, if not more.

The grasshoppers, touch wood, don’t seem to like them.  Occasionally, a little brown lizard will pretend to be the dried out center of a bloom—dangerous to my blood pressure and his life if I happen to be deadheading the old ones to make way for the new.  But, generally speaking, they are maintenance-free.  They don’t care if I water them or not.  They don’t care if they get any sun or not.

They just go on being bright and cheerful.

I am thankful.