The determined cactus

For Christmas last year Spark got a little kit to grow cactus. Being the farmer that he is, he whipped open the package, actually read the directions, prepared the soil and lovingly placed the tiny seeds in the dirt. He check for growth every day for the first few weeks. Nothing. Then he checked once in a while the next few weeks. Nothing. They are probably duds he decided. The little seeds in their growing dome were forgotten on the window sill. One day on a whim he looked at them again and there were four little green specks. You had to squint to see them but they were there none the less. At that time he gave them their every few months watering. A couple months later they were visible without squinting. Today he took them down to give them their triannual watering and they had little prickles on them! With the prickles, which accounts for about half their size, they are now maybe a quarter of an inch tall. Seven months and a quarter of an inch. Good grief, growing cactus is for the patient people in the world. My mom has a cactus that is over 80 years old, it was her mother's, and it is about 18 inches high. It has never changed in all the years I can remember but maybe since they grow so slow it has been pushing onward and upward all these years and no one has noticed. I guess that shows that with steady growth, no matter how slow, we can all reach our full potential and perhaps it is just designed to take a little longer for some of us.