Back in 2005, my husband and I went on a wonderful vacation to Hawaii.  While visiting the Dole Plantation, we saw a plumeria stick.  We thought it would turn into a bush and that would be neat to have in the house.  The flowers smell so wonderful.
Well, one thing lead to another and the ‘stick’ got shoved out of the way and forgotten.  Flash forward more than a year.  I’m cleaning out a closet and low and behold there is the plumeria, still in it’s plastic wrapping with it’s price tag on it…and a green leaf growing out the end.

Whoa!

It’s been forgotten in a closet for a year, no water, no light, how could it be growing?  The answer to that question is I have no idea, but it did.  We decided that it showed such perseverance that we should put it in a pot and see what happens to it when it get’s water and height.  Amazingly, not a lot.  It grew very slowly.

Flash forward again to early summer 2011.  In Colorado where I live there is lots of sun.  I think we have sunshine in the state on average 360 days a year or something like that.  We’d put the plumeria outside in order to  get some of that sunshine.  It is a tropical plant after all.  It had been outside for several weeks and was doing very well.  Getting taller, got a few new leaves.  Suddenly a severe windstorm came up.  It ripped every leaf off the poor tree.  Now I have two four foot trunks sticking out of a pot.  But the trunks looked healthy, so we continued to water the trunks.

The trunks seemed to be alive and thriving.  Soon leaves started appearing.  Great bunches of them.  More than we’d ever had before.  Needless to say, I was shocked and thrilled at the same time.  When the grasshoppers came and started to eat my beautiful tree, we took it back inside.

That was about three months ago.  This past week pale green, almost white, buds started to appear at the top of the mass of leaves.  My tree was flowering!  This tree we bought as a stick was now reproducing.  The flowers smell wonderful.  The tree now sits in front of the patio sliding door so it gets plenty of light and I make sure it gets all the water it needs, too.  It may flower all winter, I hope so.

My writing has been like the plumeria.  A life changing event sent my muse to the closet where it stayed in the dark, hibernating for many years.  I didn’t even know if I could still write.  It was four years before I wrote again.  Then another life changing event, a heart attack scare, made me realize how important writing was to me and if I was ever going to do it now was the time.

I finished the book I’d been “working” on for ten years, overnight.  I was in the hospital and you can’t ever get any sleep in there anyway, so I put my time to good use.  I got the skeleton done.  Sure it needed lots of editing and some of the “leaves” fell off, but I’d done it.  I’d finished my book.

Slowly my leaves came back and then the book started to flower until all the buds opened and I published it.  My stick had come back and grown in to a beautiful tree.

How about you?  Where are you in your plumeria cycle?  Do you feel like all of your leaves have fallen off?  Or are you starting to flower?