I Planted my Dinner Potato and Love What Happened

Ah, the lowly potato. The clothing equivalent of a potato is a white T-shirt, and a dirty one at that. The ice cream equivalent would be plain old, off-brand vanilla. It's just about as glamorous as a smudgy blank canvas, with all the bells and whistles of a formless lump of clay. We usually buy potatoes because they're cheap, and they make the perfect vehicle for other, more exciting things. You know, like cheddar, bacon bits, and chives. No one really buys a potato just to have one.

Then, of course, there's that weird thing they do when you forget the bag of spuds you left in the bottom corner of your pantry. Half the taters get soggy and pungent, and the rest...they grow. Like alien invaders. We've all seen the unpleasant, hardly edible fingers that our forgotten potatoes spread all over the place, without soil, sunlight, or water. It's almost creepy.

So it was I found myself eyeballing one particular spud that was growing a strange green afro. It was the last of it's buddies (or should I say, spuddies?) and had been left alone a few weeks too long. I stared at this leathery, wrinkled thing, perplexed by its determination to grow without any of the resources I've come to expect for a plant. This funky potato...it had some serious resilience in it's starchy little core. I admired that. This time, instead of chucking it, I planted it.

Here's what it looks like today:

Check out that foliage! This is one of the toughest, most resourceful plants I've ever seen. It doubled in size after one rain storm, and what once was an off-kilter afro has turned into a respectable spray of leaves. Google even tells me I can expect it to flower soon.

I love my potato now, because it's the perfect example of the kind of rags-to-riches resilience that many of us hope to achieve for ourselves. A lack of resources, a poor start, a less-than-glamorous reputation...we don't need to assume that these hurtles are enough to "chuck" us like the proverbial, overgrown spud. This little dude waited in the dry, dark pantry (watching all his friends systematically killed, no less,) and survived until he could thrive. So forget the bells and whistles, the cheddar and chives...If I were to choose my spirit plant, I'd pick the potato.