Nothing Grows Alone
My home doesn’t look like it belongs in Better Homes and Gardens. It isn’t polished or well-appointed in the way an interior designer might choose. But I like to think of it in the way I recently read in one of those generalized Instagram carousels:
“She is the one moving at her own pace, and making it look like a lifestyle choice. Fresh flowers bought for no one but herself. The good olive oil. The expensive linen bedding that will last a decade. A home that feels like an exhale the moment you walk in. The one who makes pleasure an act of devotion… The one who can take anything ordinary and make it feel like abundance.”
That is it. My home is like a big exhale. It is comfortable, and every item in it has been chosen for a memory or a sense of peace. It is small, but warm and inviting. An invitation to curl up on the couch or in a chair next to the fire, grab a book, let the cat settle on your lap, and sip your favorite drink from a special mug. Natural light pours in from several angles, and even on gray days it catches the open wood beams and gives the room a feeling of warmth.
Everything has a memory attached to it. Even the plants.
Crashed on the Floor
A plant sits nestled in a pot that holds the last vestiges of a jade tree I once considered a prized possession. Only a few singular, scraggly stalks remain of what was once a beautifully shaped, 20-plus-year-old plant. The original traveled with me from Georgia to Colorado, and then on to Washington. It survived neglect, my marriage falling apart, changes in temperature and elevation, different pots, and my, at the time, horrible green thumb. Somehow, the jade survived it all.
The jade tree grows slowly, almost stubbornly. At first it looks like something that ought to be protected from the world, a few tender leaves hanging from a green stem. But years have a way of changing it. The stems thicken into branches. The branches become wood. Eventually, the trunk begins to carry the weight of the whole thing. Its leaves grow thick and fleshy, storing water for some future drought. It does not know when the drought will come. It simply prepares for it by growing.
That is how a jade becomes hardy. Not through one great ordeal, but through the accumulation of ordinary days.
One night, I went to bed early, partly because I typically wake up at 4:30 a.m., and partly because I was emotionally spent from trying to manage a relationship that was constantly draining me. My partner was a night owl and was still awake, watching a movie and enjoying a drink. Sometime after midnight, I heard a loud crash. It woke me with such a jolt that I was afraid to go into the living room where the sound had come from. The light was still on. I could hear rustling, and then another crash.
I got out of bed, opened the door, and found my partner sprawled on the floor, drunkenly moving around. The pot containing my beloved jade tree was tipped over and broken. Branches lay snapped and scattered through the dirt. For a moment, I didn't know what to do first. Try to save my plant, or sort out the mess that was my partner. I walked to him, gathered him up, got him standing, and directed him toward the bedroom. As I scooped the pieces of my beloved tree and the dirt back into what remained of the pot and cleaned up the broken pottery, he made his way toward the door.
Except it wasn't the door toward our bathroom and bedroom.
It was the front door.
He stood next to it, looked out the window, placed a hand on the door frame to steady himself, and peed on the wall. I sat there with dirt on my hands and grabbed the paper towels to clean up his mess, thinking about how this could not be apologized away the next morning by saying it was an accident. I suppose accidents are easier to forgive.
Something about watching that thick old trunk, those branches that had slowly become wood, lying broken on the floor felt strangely familiar. I had spent years tending to that tree, watching it become hardy without ever becoming indestructible. And then, in a few careless moments, something I had built and cared for was reduced to pieces.
Our relationship did not end in some clean, deliberate act of closure either. It came apart through accumulated damage, carelessness, and moments when something that had taken years to grow could be destroyed in an instant.
There was no graceful ending. Just wreckage.
For a long time, I thought the important part of that night was what had been destroyed. The broken pot. The branches scattered across the floor. The relationship that had slowly become something neither of us could repair.
But destruction is rarely as complete as it feels in the moment.
Two small stalks had broken away from the old tree, and they were still green. Still alive. I put them into another pot and waited to see what they would do. If a leaf falls off, I shove it into the soil and hope it will root. Maybe it will become another plant. Maybe, given enough time, it will become some version of the sturdy jade tree I once had. Perhaps that is the strange thing about plants. They don't seem particularly interested in the endings we give things. A broken branch can become a new plant. A clipping can become another generation. We tend to think of survival as something that happens to an individual, but plants have another way of looking at it. They simply keep going, sometimes by becoming something else.
A Lineage in the Roots
I think about that when I look at the Hoya in my kitchen, because it is not really my plant at all. It is a small, living piece of the women who came before me. In my kitchen window, and on another windowsill in the living room, are two Hoya plants. They are the great-grandchildren of my great-grandmother's Hoya. She grew one for ages and then gave a clipping to her daughter, my grandmother.
That clipping grew and grew. I remember seeing it when I was growing up, beginning at the edge of the tub and making its way up and around the large picture window my grandfather built, a window that filled the entire wall next to the tub. It grew longer and longer, and it is still there.
A clipping of it was given to my mother. Hers grows in her bathroom, and another lives in her kitchen. About ten years ago, she gave me a clipping from hers. That is the plant that lives in my house.
It flowers a few times a year, producing beautiful waxy pink flowers with a faint, fair perfume. They drip a sugary sap. When I see the flowers, and the tiny droplet of sap held by surface tension alone, suspended from the tip of a flower, I think about my maternal lineage.
Is it possible that this plant carries something of my family with it?
Not memory in the way I remember a face or a conversation, but something quieter. Something carried forward without anyone having to name it. The women who cooked a thousand meals while the plant slowly grew. Who cried a million tears. Who dreamed a hundred dreams of something different. The Hoya came to me through a series of hands without anyone needing to explain what was being passed along. A clipping became a plant, which became another clipping, which became another plant.
It is difficult not to see something of my family in that.
Blooming at a Different Time
But there are other things we inherit that are given to us more deliberately, sometimes without words at all. My grandmother has always had a way of giving things without making a ceremony of the giving. A few years ago, when she could see that I was coming apart, she gave me another plant.
There is a large deck outside her bedroom, and the bedroom door leads into a sunroom before opening onto the deck. The sunroom helps heat the bedroom in winter, and it is also a little greenhouse where my grandmother grows her Christmas cactus and other houseplants.
A few years ago, she could sense things were off with me. We had moved into a new home and intended to use it as a fresh start. But a change of scenery does not necessarily change what is happening inside a person. Instead of throwing out the emotions and behaviors that were no longer necessary, he had packed them away in a box, trying to forget them. He was drowning them in alcohol.
I tried my best to hold on.
I was falling apart myself.
On a visit to my grandmother, she handed me one of her large Christmas cacti. She said it was because she was clearing some of the plants out of her sunroom and wanted me to have it. When I looked around the sunroom, it didn't appear to be getting cleared out.
But there was a hole among the plant stands where the cactus had once sat. She had made room for me.
I can still picture it in her hands, the strange, flat green segments layered over one another, each little leaf holding itself out from the next. It wasn't an impressive plant. There were no flowers that day, nothing bright or dramatic about it. Just a small, stubborn thing in a plain pot.
She didn't tell me why she had chosen it for me. She simply held it out and let me take it. Maybe she understood something I couldn't yet articulate.
The Christmas cactus is a slow-growing plant. It doesn't demand much, but it endures. It holds water in its leaves and waits. When the conditions are right, it blooms, sometimes long after everything else in the garden has finished flowering. Looking back, I wonder if that was her quiet way of telling me that there is strength in lasting. In moving slowly. In paying attention to the small things that keep us alive.
Not everything blooms on schedule.
Sometimes we spend a long time looking as though nothing is happening, when underneath the surface we are gathering strength.
And sometimes, when we least expect it, we bloom. The Christmas cactus made me think differently about what it means to grow. Maybe growth isn't always visible. Maybe sometimes it is simply the quiet work of staying alive until the season changes. The plants in my house seem to understand this better than I do.
They don't compare themselves to one another. They don't seem concerned with whether they are growing quickly enough or blooming when they are supposed to. They respond to the conditions around them.
Waiting To Thrive
The Monstera, especially, has shown me this. It is now about eight feet tall, with countless leaves and air roots, but it started as two leaves on a stalk in a small pot. I purchased it when I first started working in an office at the refinery. I had an 8-by-8-foot cubicle with no window or access to natural daylight. Yet somehow, I filled it with plants. I tended to them gently and hoped they would thrive. For nine years, that Monstera slowly and silently grew. I tended to her. She stayed in that little cubicle with me. Two years ago, I went fully remote and moved my plants into my home. It took a month or two for her to adjust to the new space and the new way of things.
I used to get one or two new leaves a year.
These last two years, I have had seven.
She now has a strap hanging from the ceiling, encouraging her to grow upward and higher. There is a spray bottle that hangs on her pot and is just for her. Out of habit, if I am walking by and think about it, she gets a few misty sprays. Sometimes, when I mist the Monstera, I imagine that somewhere inside it there is a memory of a place it has never seen. Not a memory in the way I remember a face or a road, but something older and less precise. A shape written into its leaves. A tendency to reach, climb, and search for light. I don't know if that is genetic memory or simply the nature of the plant, but the thought stays with me.
I have always been fascinated by the possibility that things can carry traces of where they came from, even when they have traveled far from it. A genetic memory, distant but real.
Like the memory I have of sitting in the courtyard at Casa Palot, the home of the Sula Sula family. I had flown to Guatemala on pure blind faith. The goal was to attend the Sumpango Giant Kite Festival in honor of Día de los Muertos. I did not know anyone in Guatemala, nor was I really able to speak Spanish beyond a few absolutely rudimentary phrases. I had a contact who lived in the country and was well connected to the activities, but we only knew each other because of Facebook. I messaged him and said I wanted to buy a plane ticket and asked if he could put me in contact with some of the people making the kites.
A month later, I was sitting in the courtyard, having just stepped off the plane, where I was introduced to a very quiet man, Florentin Sula Sula, with gentle eyes and a soft smile. He didn't speak English. Through various hand gestures, I understood that I was to follow him and would be staying with him and his family. Their home was several rooms ringing the central courtyard. Florentin and his wife lived there with their three daughters, his brother and his wife and their two children, and his parents. The courtyard was overflowing with plants from the surrounding rainforest that had been trained into pots and open spaces.
Little songbirds lived there, too. Sometimes they came down to inspect the items on the ofrenda or clean up parts of your breakfast.
The longer you sat and watched the birds move through the courtyard, the more details revealed themselves. Mayan pottery and artifacts had been found in the surrounding countryside. The family had Mayan ancestry, and the pieces were more than interesting things they had found while farming.
They carried their own memory.
It was there in the carvings and the shape of each piece. Loving hands had once shaped an object. Other hands had held it and used it. Later, another set of hands found it in the dirt, dusted it off, and placed it in their home. By placing those objects among the plants and the ordinary evidence of everyday life, they gave the memory somewhere to live.
One large ceramic pot sat somewhat centrally in the courtyard. Not central in the way that it was the defining feature, but because it marked an intersection of paths between the rooms as people crossed the courtyard. The pot was filled with water. Every little storm or bit of rain sent water flowing down the branches of the Monstera that called it home, refilling the pot. A few small goldfish lived in the water, eating bugs and whatever detritus fell into it.
The Monstera had attached its roots to the side and rim of the pot and was overflowing one side. Part of its toes were solidly in the water, the other feet free and dry. Air roots stretched out like arms and found purchase on beams and posts. The longer I sat in that courtyard, the less it seemed possible to separate the things in it from one another.
The plants were not decorations.
The pottery was not simply something old.
The water was not merely water, and the fish were not simply fish.
Everything seemed to have found a way to belong to something else.
Roots found pots. Rain found water. Birds found the offerings left by people. Objects carried the hands of people who were no longer there.
Nothing had arrived in that courtyard without a history, and nothing seemed to exist there entirely on its own. Through the simple act of living and growing, the Monstera married the pot to the structure of the house, the sky overhead to the fish in the pot, and all of the things in between.
BOOK: The Piano Shop on the Left Bank - Thad Carhart - A man is walking down a street in Paris and finds a small storefront with a simple sign for a piano atelier. He finally gets an introduction to the atelier's master and then a deep history about the piano, and it awakens a lost childhood passion. I am recommending this book because not only do I absolutely love it, but I like the parallel of how it took time and a change of circumstance to love something in a different way, to grow differently, like my plants.
SONG: Kind & Generous - Natalie Merchant
Classic song of the 90's. I listened to when I was younger, knowing the lyrics, but at the time they seemed like 'just nice lyrics'. I was recently cleaning my house and moving the plants around and the 90's acoustic playlist was on in the background. This song came on and I paused. Flooded with memories. Is there a single person I would direct this to?
Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.
I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.
Love from the road,
Nic & Rally
Comments