Go hug a cactus today

I convinced my mom to buy some small cacti from a grocery store one spring when I was in my early teens. We planted them in a pot and set them outside on the back patio for the summer. If memory serves me, one of the cacti died that summer, but the other two hung on. They hung on so well, in fact, that one is at our house and the other was in my office at work until recently. For ~18 years they've been slowly getting bigger and bigger, posing an ever-increasing health risk to children and coworkers.

Last week I noticed an odd brown spot on the cactus I keep here at work. The next day, about 2/3 of the plant was an ugly brown color. I found a website all about cacti and sent a snapshot of the cactus to the site in hopes of getting some pointers on how to bring it back to health. The response I got was a bit of a shock:

"Well, first off, it's not a cactus."

What? For almost two decades I've been raising an Euphorbia Kamerunica? I have no idea what that means, but it was a shock nonetheless -- akin to finding out that Baxter was really an african flat-nose badger or something.

The cactus guy assured me that it was as close to a cactus as you could get without being a cactus (it has thorns instead of spines), so the care instructions were the same. He advised waiting a few days to let the soil dry out and then repotting. If that didn't work, he suggested taking some cuttings and starting over again. While waiting for the soil to dry, I watched as one arm withered and collapsed, while the others began to slowly shrink and lose their green tone.

I brought the plant home on Friday and intended to go to work on it the next day. When I looked at it on Saturday, I saw that a fungus had pretty much destroyed the entire plant from the inside out. No repotting. No cuttings. There goes 17 years of care and 40 inches of growth into the trash.

Sally said it was ok for me to cry about my cactus. I'm not quite that sentimental about plants, but I must admit that I noticed the empty spot on my shelf right away this morning when I came into work. Ethan has graciously offered to help me pick out a new cactus from Home Depot and plant it, so I guess we'll see if the next one can last long enough to carry me into retirement.