Stapelia blooms...

Matthew gave me a cutting of a little Stapelia and it's has decided to bloom; a star-shaped flower, slightly odorous, foul, it attracts flies. This is a slight variation on a former, long lost Stapelia that bloomed in a cracked terra cotta pot on the rickety front porch of our old house on Ronan Avenue, in Wilmington, California...sixty years ago, a faultless memory of something so insignificant. Last Saturday I bought another kind of Stapelia from a woman at the farmers' market in the Trinity Hospital parking lot, for 75 cents; it's also blooming, a cluster of buds, the one flower that's open, a dark oxblood color, small, also star-shaped, perfect, the inner texture like velvet.