Transplants

My mother and I went out today, and we each bought ourselves a little plant. She, an African Violet, and I, a white potted rose. I paid for them, and had them wrapped up tightly in plastic while she ran out to get the car heated up and pulled around. They are such sensitive creatures.

At home, we pulled the bags and the tacky plastic wrappings off them and set about finding them little pots. I went to the basement, to my mother's makeshift potting bench: a long, laminate bookshelf filled with vases and vessels, covered with seedlings all tangled up together. It is the best sort of mess.

There with the starts of heirloom plants all jumbled in purgatory,waiting for bigger pots, I felt such overwhelming sadness. The jade plants have all caught some awful disease, and at the very same moment, drooped and shriveled in their separate pots. They are all relatives, of course, cut from the same ancient plant, and in the basement, on top of my mother's potting bench they were all dying.

I found a blue ceramic pot and went upstairs to my little rose. After wiping its leaves dry,I carried it to where it sits in my bedroom window, alongside a bell-jar terrarium and the last healthy jade cutting, which has no pot. I am afraid that our old, happy jades do not like it here in Maryland. They grew for years in Illinois. But I know what it means for a place itself to make you ill. There is only one small branch left. For now, while it's just a baby, I am rooting it in a bud vase. Sooner or later, it is going to need some soil. Maybe then my thumb will turn very green, and it will take root.