{from April 2016} My mother kept plants in the sunny dining room for my entire life.
When the leaflets of the oxalis had died off, she’d gather their limp stems and dry little hung heads in one hand, tugging them gently all the way around the pot, and throw the fistful in the wastebasket under the kitchen sink.
She’d pinch off the sodden and still-vibrant spent flowers of her Christmas cacti. She’d walk around the house, tending to other easy chores in her bathrobe (she loved to be in her bathrobe for hours), cradling the blooms for a long time, as if she’d forgotten them in her small hand.
She’d cut back certain fast-growing plants only when they began to encroach in a serious way. Once, she made an alarming discovery: the philodendron by the front window, under its mounds of snaking and sprawling leaves, had started to grow into the cushy green carpet.
She didn’t have fancy plants. She left many of them in the cheap plastic pots in which they came to her. She never lost her head and decided that orchids were where she’d go next. With simple order and kindness, she kept this collection of living green things beautiful for decades: water, pinch off, cut back, turn the pots every once in awhile.
In my mind, I’ll always picture her bent low at the waist, her size 5 feet bare and nestling into the carpet, smiling over her peaceful kingdom of unhurried life.