[from daily respite](https://dailyrespite.substack.com/p/february-12-2022)

> Yesterday I said that I have no idea how to overwinter amaryllis bulbs, but this is only partly true. I know what you’re supposed to do, I just don’t have a very good track record at it.  
> Back at the start of the pandemic, when everyone was hoarding yeast and stockpiling seeds, I decided to try again. I let the greens die back and put the pots in a dark corner of the basement.  
> Where they sat, forgotten, until more than a year later when my beloved came up from the basement holding three sad pots of crinkled empty nothingness.  
> “Can I please throw these outside?” she asked.  
> I surrendered to the inevitable, and out they went.  
> Fast-forward to summer. We were in the middle of a heatwave. I was standing at the kitchen window when I spotted something bright red sticking out of our brush pile in the woods. Was it a cardinal? No, it looked more like a flower. But I hadn’t planted anything over there. Unless…  
> Yes. Those dead bulbs had miraculously come back to life and were in full bloom. On the brush pile, in the woods.

In its less metaphorical sense, I have always preferred planting [bulbs](#bulbs) to seeds. We talk a lot metaphorically about the seeds of an idea. Are the long-running interests of one's life bulbs?