Eighty-Four Glyde Fables: The Little Greenhouse that Could

Once upon a time there was a little old lady who lived all by herself in a big, empty house. Living alone made her sad, so she decided one day that she would build a greenhouse next to her house.

So she did.

Her greenhouse was a beautiful building that held rows upon rows of the most exquisite flowers and plants you’d ever seen. There were snapdragons, lilies, tulips, ficus, quamoclits, begonias, roses and a variety of other unique flowers that couldn’t be found anywhere else. The beauty of each flower in her greenhouse surpassed the plant before it.

The greenhouse was the old lady’s pride and joy and she loved to spend hours each morning watering, talking to and caring for her plants.

One morning the old lady noticed something upsetting about her beautiful greenhouse. While the plants at the end of each row grew big and stood up tall and strong, the plants in the middle of the rows were small and weak looking. The old lady couldn’t explain why this was. Worst of all, her beloved Rose, the pride of all her flowers, the one that was more beautiful than all the other flowers combined, looked fragile, near death.

Concerned by what she had discovered, the old lady decided to run out of the greenhouse and pour through every botanical book she could find in her library.

So she did.

That night, in the greenhouse, the flowers had a conversation.

“Why,” the small Rose said to its neighbor, a tall ficus, “why is it that the old lady is sad?”

“The problem is that the flowers at the ends of the rows are growing tall and beautiful, while the flowers in the middle of the rows, (like you) are small and weak. She doesn’t know why it’s happening and it upsets her,” the ficus responded.

The Rose thought about this, then turned its petals toward the ficus and again posed a question: “do you know why we’re not all growing beautiful and strong as she would like?”

“Yes I do, little bud. You see, we need sunlight to grow. It nurtures us and gives us warmth. Without the sun, we will all wither and die. The sun always rises in the east and sets in the west. Unfortunately, this greenhouse was built facing the wrong direction, so only some flowers get the full benefit of the sunlight,” explained the ficus.

“Is there anything we can do to fix that problem and make the old lady happy again?” asked the Rose.

“Hmmmm, there are two options here: we could rotate the greenhouse so that everybody gets sun, but that is too difficult and would require outside help,” the ficus said. “Or, we could change the orbit of the sun so that it rises in the north and sets in the south.”

So they did.

And then the worlds were thrown out of their orbits, the seas crashed upon the shores, fires spread across the face of the planet, the glaciers ran aground in the Caribbean, birds flew into volcanoes, animals ran straight into chasms and the Earth spun out into the cold harsh emptiness of space, never to be seen or heard from again, because all life on the planet was dead.

The End

Moral: Never listen to any Rose. They never have anything good to say and only cause you pain and trouble.