I haven’t always been this terrible with houseplants. There was a time when I had a shelf full of gardening books, vegetables growing in the backyard, and so many potted plants dotted around my house that it took me half an hour and many trips to the sink to water them all each week. I plucked their dry leaves, deadheaded their spent blooms, and pruned, fertilized, and repotted them. I knew how to make things grow.
But over the past ten or fifteen years, my once-green thumb has steadily withered until the only plants that can survive in my home are those unreasonably tolerant of neglect. The peace lily I put on my bedside table to combat insomnia (we have both let each other down) is languishing, her leaf tips yellow and rusting to brown. The fiddle-leafed fig in the corner of my living room droops like the shoulders of the damned.
I know I am failing them, but I can’t help it. Between the demands of my business and my recent illness, I’ve been too exhausted, too busy, and in too much pain over the past year to do much more for them than tip the odd half-drunk glass of water into their soil.
Just before Christmas, I brought a young and rebellious newcomer into the house: a monstera plant that is so lush and vigorous, it’s almost indecent. Is this what a truly healthy plant looks like? I’d forgotten.
I didn’t mean to acquire yet another houseplant. In a way, he chose me, much as a wayward neighborhood cat might stroll in through your open back door and prowl imperiously around your kitchen looking for milk and meat like a little lord of the manor. I found the monstera by the side of the road, abandoned on the grassy verge by landscapers who had dug him out of an overcrowded garden. I felt he’d been left in my path as a gift from the universe, so I hefted the black plastic pot onto my hip and carried it home.
I worried the monstera might lose some of his vigor under my roof, especially since shortly after bringing him home I flew to Canada for the holidays, leaving all my plants in the occasional care of a neighbor for two whole weeks. When I got back I was astounded to see that far from wilting in my absence, the monstera had expanded in size by about a third.
Now a month later, his growth shows no signs of abating. This roguish plant doesn’t seem to realize that he no longer lives outdoors but in the home of a woman whose life force has ebbed to an all-time low.
I am now officially a breast cancer survivor, having had my fifth and final surgery in October. I’ve been trying to get my fitness back, but the adjuvant endocrine therapy I’m on, coupled with many months of inactivity, has left me frail. My joints are stiff and my muscles are plagued by mysterious shooting pains. In November I severely pulled my lower back simply by getting off the sofa a smidge too quickly, a silly injury so alarmingly debilitating that it sent me back to my physical therapist for help.
She put me on an exercise routine fit for a geriatric invalid. Stability before strength is her motto. We started with lying-down leg lifts and pushups against a wall, from which I’ve now graduated to counter pushups. It’s going to be a long road back to the physical power I once took for granted.
To help breathe life back into my limbs without risking another muscle strain, I took to doing a gentle qi gong routine in the mornings. Qi gong is a gentle Chinese martial art meant to get your life force (or qi) flowing more freely. It doesn’t look much like “exercise” to me. Tap, tap, tapping soft fists from ankle to groin, the gentle swinging of arms, a lot of deep breaths. I thought to myself, this can’t possibly be doing much for me. But by the end of my first time completing the routine, it felt like cool water was flowing through my veins. My qi was rising.
I looked at the monstera with fresh eyes. This handsome young plant is positively bursting with qi. His life force is so strong, his fecundity so audacious, I almost feel he’s daring me to keep up with him. Sprawling out his juicy green limbs, making his daily offering of tender new leaves of sparkling chartreuse, he is all verdant seduction. If he keeps growing at this rate, we’re going to have to move to a bigger apartment.
I might be imagining things, but it seems that the monstera’s qi is waking my other plants from their comas. The fig has put out its first new leaf in many months. Even the sad remaining sprig of a supermarket succulent that’s been barely hanging on for over a year is plumper and taller this week, and I can see a new shoot peeping out from its bed of soil.
I carry the smaller plants to the bathtub and submerge their pots one by one in a bucket of water, as my French mother-in-law taught me to do, watching for the air bubbles to stop, which means the soil is saturated. With a soft, damp cloth I gently wipe a layer of dust from the straplike leaves of the peace lily and my long-suffering dracaena, and from the bowed, leathery paddles of the fig. I root around under my kitchen sink and find a spray bottle, fill it with fresh water, and give them all a generous misting. I even blow on them to give them an extra burst of carbon dioxide and whisper to them, I’m back, and I’m ready to take proper care of you.
I know my body will never return to “normal” — how could it, when part of it has been cut away? But some sensation is starting to return to the surface of my chest. Where the nerves were severed from their roots during my mastectomy, I imagine their fine filaments growing back in the dark interior of my body, snaking like vines through the 6mm-thick layer of skin encasing the silicone mound that has taken the place of my left breast. I chart the edges of the numb area with my fingertip. Millimeter by millimeter, it is shrinking.
Winter in Southern California is a changeable thing, and today was unseasonably warm, a day as bright and wholesome as a hand-dipped Easter egg. So I laced up my trail shoes and walked into Griffith Park for my favorite hike, which I had not attempted in months. I moved more slowly and took more breaks than I used to need, but I made it the whole six miles, all the way up to the high trails above the canyon. These hills will be scorched brown by the sun soon enough, but for now, they are still draped in their winter robes of green. The earth is alive, and so am I.
It’s too soon to say that spring has sprung, but I can feel the season of regeneration is approaching. Back home, even the Eeyore-like fig is looking sprightlier, perking up its floppy leaves as if to say, it’s not too late to keep growing, keep going.
Life is for living, not just surviving.
Heal well my friend.