Planting
My mother was forty-nine when she took to the soil surrounding our house — well, my grandmother’s house, where my mother had grown up, returned to with me for five years of my childhood, and where she’d by then spent nearly a decade in the duplex’s adjoining house.
When I was little and we lived on our own with my first father, my mother grew many of our vegetables and “salad fruits” in our modest backyard. Our house back then — it was a townhouse, in a complex — was home to my favorite jade plant whose leaves, much to my mother’s largely unexpressed dismay, I enjoyed piercing with my tiny fingernails.
Then, something happened. My mother, maybe it was around when we moved in with my grandparents, began claiming she killed every plant under her care, that she even killed a cactus… by over-watering it… something I actually did manage to do in my twenties. We all came to take her self-assessment as truth despite what we, especially I, had seen with our own eyes.
My mother clung to this myth as her truth as fiercely and long as she insisted on the existence of Santa Claus well past the time it would be appropriate to lie to a child, particularly a Jewish one. And then, in an instant, only a few weeks into a new year, her whole world collapsed as my dad died suddenly and unexpectedly.
Just as it began to thaw, my mother gave that world a real talking-to. She returned to the ground her hands had long given up digging and she ripped, clawed, hauled, clearing away seasons of rock and neglected weeds, turning over deadened earth into life-giving energy.
When it was time, she planted — not vegetables (those would come along later, with the lawyer beau who grew up with and has returned to farm lifestyle), but flowers. She planted them in the backyard, the front yard, along the walkway, around the perimeter, in porch boxes for her and my grandmother.
And those flowers grew and she kept at it and, largely as the result of the pandemic, she now lives in a place where she has acres to care for and nurture and someone to share it with, something she never thought possible those nineteen years ago when she returned to the earth.
For Chanukkah, she and the beau sent me a plant — actually, the pre-planted bulb of a plant. I’ve already referred to my cactus incident. In my Oakland apartment, I built what I thought was a beautiful relationship with an indoor tree that I’d named after my favorite season one “Survivor” contestant only to see it inexplicably wither to death in a rather rapid period of time. When my grandmother left me in charge of her plants, the first time she begrudgingly spent a winter in Florida, only about half — the ones I’m told are more like weeds in their refusal to die — survived and those only because I suspect my mother had quietly stepped in to assist.
The thumb-of-death my mother claimed to have all those years has long been my M.O. And it’s been fine, given that at least one of my cats always likes to eat and vomit up whatever plant or flower product I attempt to keep. So, when this foliage arrived, my first response was panic and wondering if I should call the friend in the Bronx with a thumb as green as I picture Ireland in springtime to take it away and give it a safe home. But my mother and her beau assured me that I could largely take the instructions with a grain of salt — that any light and source of warmth, even sticking it atop the fridge, would be fine.
My mother was careful to warn me more than once about the watering instructions — those I should follow exactly and only water when the soil was dry — really, actually dry and not when I worried it would become dry. I stuck the plant on the one window ledge where it would fit and not be endangered by the cat who can theoretically get herself to that spot, and then largely ignored it.
I wasn’t going to make the mistake I’d made with “Gervase” — no developing attachments. Every few days, I touched the soil and resisted every urge to moisten it. I’d forget about the plant and then, in grabbing the yoga mat, notice it was dry and needing attention at which point I watered it from a Pyrex measuring cup.
And then, very quickly, it began growing. The speed and shape were freakishly similar to the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” but I knew to expect flowers that look like lilies and not something more akin to the Venus Flytrap I’d watched in the hopes of some action at my friend’s kitchen sink in Seattle on my last pre-COVID trip.
I am not far from the age my mother was when she rediscovered — or, in her mind, discovered — her green thumb. Today, my “Channukah miracle” plant sports five full flowers with more on the way and a second stalk tall and readying for bloom. Perhaps it was simply a matter of patiently awaiting my time. Or, like so many other things over this last year, maybe I had to stop saying, “I can’t,” and, like my mother did those long years ago, just dig in.
