The Christmas Cactus

 The Christmas Cactus A large stainless steel bowl sat at the top of the stairs in my grandmother Rebecca Miner’s rambling old farmhouse. The bowl was the top chamber from an old milk and cream separator that Granddad had used on his farm. The raw milk was poured into the top bowl and a centrifuge would separate the milk from the cream as it flowed through the machine. The milk was to drink and cream churned to be butter.
The shiny metal bowl was nearly thirty inches in diameter and eighteen inches high and sat squarely in the center of a large Mission Oak desk, designed to look like a library table with open shelves on each side and wide drawer in the middle.
The steep wooden stairs with long curved handrail climbed the distance of twelve feet to disappear into the dark reaches of the second floor where Grandma kept the huge plant. The large stainless steel container was converted to be the planter for the old Christmas cactus. The plant had long ago filled the creamery pot and spilled over the full rounded sides, cascading in long green streams. It was an enormous thing, like a queen sitting on her throne to rule one end of the hallway.
The desk and plant were in the cool dark hallway. The window behind the desk and cactus was covered by a green, room-darkening shade Grandma kept it pulled nearly all the way down allowing a only small amount to light to slip through an eight inch space.
This monstrous plant had started its life as a snippet shortly after my grandparents’ wedding. Year after year it continued to grow and Grandma would transplant it into larger containers to match the growth of the cactus.
The only container I can remember as I visited Grandma’s farm house was the enormous stainless steel cream separator. The cactus developed thick, gnarled stems that paralleling the thickened and gnarling of my grandmother’s arthritic, feet, hands and fingers.
The flat-green, oval-shaped, ripple-edged leaves tumbled in thick perfusion over the edge of the steel separator and flowed down its sides in waves. The leaves nearly hid the container beneath its thick foliage.
Just before Christmas, that dark corner of the hallway would suddenly explode into color. The cactus would spill its blossoms in colorful waterfalls that floated on a sea of green. Each bloom looked like a series of colorful trumpets stuck one inside on another. The colors ran the gamut of hues from deep watermelon pink to a hot orange-red and even into a pale yellow. They looked like small fiery torches blazing in a dark green sky.
The expanse of colorful blossoms would only last several days. One by one they bloomed, showed the their beauty, then would slowly wilt and drop to the floor like a plague of dead insects with their colors fading to a ghostly white. They waited until Grandma would sweep them up and toss them into a trash grave.
When my grandmother could no longer take care of her large rambling farm house, she decided to have an auction to get rid of all the things that would not fit into a mobile home she had bought. I am not sure who bought the massive Christmas cactus, but I hope that it still fills another person’s home with its beauty at each Christmas season.