As life slow-walks back toward normalcy after months of lockdown, some have noticed their pre-pandemic lives have languished from neglect after so much downtime.
French woman Donna Porée decided to leave her apartment in L’Aigle and stay at her partner’s place in the city of Caen when the lockdown started. Little did she know it would last three full months. Upon returning to her flat, she immediately realized that something wasn’t right, The Mirror reported.
In her apartment, Porée found an impressive and slightly terrifying growth that had flourished during the quarantine. “As I opened the front door, I noticed a strange shape at the back of the kitchen,” Porée told the media outlet. “As the light was off and shutters down, I didn’t realize it was the potatoes.”
The 22-year-old communications manager snapped pictures of alien-like pink tendrils that had grown all over her kitchen and up the walls and shared them on Twitter along with a caption:
“After 3 months of absence my potatoes decided to grow without limits to the point of making holes in the shelves.”
The potatoes had sprouted tendrils that sprawled up the wall, reaching toward the ceiling, puncturing through kitchen calking, and stretching outward toward the broom and TV.
“I was terrified at first,” Porée said, “but after realizing what it was I laughed a lot and shared a video of the plant on Snapchat.” The photos, which were posted online on June 12, also frightened and delighted people on social media, going viral and amassing nearly 200,000 likes and 60,000 shares.
A friend responded with a good deal of understatement: “It’s a little scary,” to which Porée replied with more than a little hyperbole: “A little? I wasn’t far from a heart attack.”
It turned out that Porée wasn’t the only person to find strange sproutings taking over in their absence during the lockdown. Fellow French Twitter user Noel Florent posted a video showing potatoes gone amok in his apartment.
He explained in the video showing the telltale pink roots growing out of the kitchen, “I looked in my cupboard and there were [expletive] potatoes that had sprouted everywhere.”
Porée responded in a tongue-in-cheek way, asking, “What was the brand? It could be the same variety.” Soon, the photos of phenomenal potato growths were streaming in.
Twitter user Constance Bourget posted a picture of a brown paper bag out of which some of her potatoes had grown a bouquet of new shoots several feet long. “We are together. LOL,” she wrote.
Many people found the growth of the tendrils, resembling something out of “Stranger Things,” to be quite unnerving. “I think I’m starting to develop a phobia of sprouted potatoes,” one person wrote in a tweet. Another wrote that they were “disgusted” but couldn’t say exactly why.
Meanwhile, others thought the potatoes should be lauded rather than feared. One person shared, “This potato, worked hard to survive, it deserves a corner of the garden from now on.”
While the potatoes’ fate is still being debated, it took Porée some time to detach the tendrils from her kitchen. But there’s no doubt she’ll be more careful next time she leaves her apartment for a while.
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