Brobdingnagian Dahlias

I snapped a picture of my first dahlia bloom this morning and sent it to my Mainer friend who gifted me six dahlia rhizomes back in the spring.  Only four of the plants grew, but those four are over five feet tall and still growing.  We went to visit her last night and her dahlia plants looked way more normal-sized.  Not sure why mine are so massive, but I'm going with it.  She texted me back that I'd smile when they really open up.  I'm grinning from ear to ear that they just bloomed.  She went on to tell me a story.  A few years ago her husband's buddy "thrusted" (her words) a dahlia rhizome at her and it's become the gift that keeps giving because she gives them to all her friends.  I looked over at my extremely happy and bloomadacious begonias which grow by my front door and just happen to be in the right place at the right time and think about how fun is is to buy perfect plants from a nursery, all showy for so long.  Annuals such as begonias that are usually tropical plants, a long way from home, will die with the first frost.  Well, some of mine look like they've forgotten how to bloom in July like all my red impatiens plants that have become bloomless.  But, it's a whole different thing, I have found, to marvel at the seeds, rhizomes, bulbs that I bury in the dirt, fertilize and water and then gaze at while they grow.  My husband grew up on a farm and looks at me, "Like, duh."  But I was more of a city/suburban girl, buying pumpkins at the grocery store. I get all deep thinking about how disconnected we can be from our food.  And in another life I might have been a farmer tending to beans, tomatoes, and corn that would I harvest and put on the table.  But for now and in this lifetime, I will enjoy my monster dahlia plants that have graced me with their Brobdingnagian growth, something out of Gulliver's Travels where I am the tiny human.  And puzzle over the impatiens that won't bloom.