Dehiscence

Day 220: I wish I could share the experience with you, but for now you will have to satisfy yourself with learning a new word with which to impress your friends: dehiscence. It is the term used to describe the point at which a pod bursts open to release the seeds in its interior.

A friend whose anonymity must be preserved for this exercise knew that I wanted to make another attempt at cultivating a few milkweed plants in the Barren Wasteland in order to obtain their husks for hobby purposes. The first time I tried it, the seeds came to me with instructions to give them a chill-down period of six weeks in my fridge. The experiment was a total failure. These, however, had experienced the chill cycle naturally, promising a better chance of success. Now whether or not the seeds and their fluff were attached to the pod when she packaged them up is a matter of conjecture. I suspect so, based on circumstances which occurred some time later. You see, the Post Office lost the parcel. It disappeared into the bowels of some facility in Chicago and remained there for almost a month before I initiated an official search for it by the tracking number. I had no idea what it contained, although the friend had cautioned me to "open it over a towel." When it finally arrived, I did so, but that did not prevent the coma...the fuzzy white parachutes...from flying all over my kitchen. If the pod had been intact on shipment, it had dehisced in transit and the seeds had detached from the coma, liberating a flurry of silk to any passing breeze such as that generated by my heating system. I cannot imagine that the nameless friend managed to gather them in that state. I had to wet my hands in order to capture them, and even now, 24 hours later, I am still finding milkweed fluff in odd places. Forget glitter. It doesn't hold a candle to milkweed coma when it comes to going everywhere.