I’m buying a new house. Oh, not at this very moment, but next year at this time, I’ll own a dog and a cat. Oh yes, acquiring pets that don’t need cages is the penultimate sign of a level of domesticity I’ve been without for too long. But since the kids have all grown and flown, and I won’t let myself have cuddly things that eat and poop till I get back into my own house, the growing and nurturing stuff has gotten, shall we say, rusty.
So I decided to start small and work up to it—you know, reacquaint myself with living things, but not so living that if I killed them, I’d get the chair. Since I’ve been nesting for months, I got excited about adopting some new plants for the back porch, which is almost too shady for life of any kind, other than mold from my garbage.
When my daughter TG said, “Uh, good luck with that,” in reference to my reputed black thumb, I had no choice but to say, “Oh yeah?”
So the day I brought the new kids home, all vibrant and happy and giving off oxygen, I took their pictures and sent them to her. Here they are, posing in all their blooming glory. I was so proud, I actually sat on my porch for about five minutes.
Before: Alive.
The two pots in the corner are confetti calypsos. The pot on the porch floor holds petunias. Notice the thriving ferns, which just hang out, oblivious to my re-entry into the field of competitive gardening and apathetic about their bee-attracting brethren.
And here are the bee-attracting brethren three months later, all gangly and dangly. It’s as if, despite my doting and judicious watering, they’ve lost the will to live.
After: Oops.
Former petunias.
Yes, that’s a pumpkin behind the former petunias. Around Halloween, I spared his life from the knife, and now I don’t have the heart to just throw him over the balcony. That would be cruel, and there’s the subsequent splat and potential bullseye to a passing pooping Fido. So Pumpy stays. But Pumpy’s got a lot of pluck, and with any luck, he’ll make it with me to the new digs. In fact, now that the black voodoo has touched the bloomers, it’s my mission to STP (save the pumpkin) just to show I can keep something alive.
So now I’m all about revival. Not the churchy kind, though I did catch a service with friends. I swear. It was refreshing to me—and a relief to my friends—that I did not burst into flames as expected on entering the House of G and that my long-held beliefs about religious dogma continue to thrive. Unlike my gasping flora, which I flooded with special fertilizer, similar to an adrenaline shot to the chlorophylled chest. And yippee, they have perked up just like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.
Not sure I’ve convinced them to stay, but, you know, I’m all they’ve got, and I’m doing my best to support them. I’m even sending TG an update on how great they’re doing—not totally neener neener neener, but sort of—using the “before” photos. She will totally buy it because she believes everything I say. Cuz I’m her mother. And I did successfully do all that nurturing stuff to get her to grow. And move out. That one took A LOT of fertilizer.
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