and found

Recently there have been a great many lovely things that find their way to me. They’re mostly inexpensive: a beautiful old radio that I’m using as a hall table that was $10, for example, or a gorgeous dress at Filene’s last night for $39.99. But the things that have me most excited, most filled with possibility and life, are green and have all been free.

Sometime in midwinter, I became obsessed with plants. Something about the lack of sun combined electrically with the fact that everything outside was dead, and suddenly all I could do was plan for all the succulents and mother in law’s tongue and dwarf citrus I was going to bring into my house and harbor like a station on the plant Underground Railroad (fleeing the whips and barbs of the winter at the gates). I made grand plans to buy all these things, but had no money… so I dreamed, and waited. I bought planters: some at IKEA when I was in DC, another beautiful milk glass one from Boomerangs last weekend – and suddenly the plants have started to arrive in droves.

It started at work. I adopted a six foot tall cactus that was clearly dying, and then found out that it was older than I was, with a history of well over thirty years at the Institute. I became terror stricken. What if I killed it? Thirty years of work that people had done, wasted. It would be like killing a middle-aged researcher (and almost certainly not as richly deserved). I brought it to my desk while I hemmed and hawed, and named it Oscar.

Due to my desk’s placement under a glass ceiling (the irony is painful), Oscar was soon joined by a refugee from my coworker Jon’s house. Vera the Punk Rock Aloe is a spiky behemoth who must, with her pot and soil and etc, weigh at least fifty pounds. It takes a dolly to move her around; her growth at Jon’s place was curtailed sharply – by the radiator. So while she convalesces from her burn wounds, she hangs out with me instead, in what I like to think of as Succulent Rehab, or even sometimes the O. K. Corral.

Then my coworker Maria brought down a tree, a large shrub and two snake plants from the office of a researcher who left his tenured position at MIT to move to Seattle; no one knows why. He left so fast that he didn’t bother to list his condo until he was already in the process of moving, so the plants in his office were probably last on his list; I’m glad Maria saved them. The two snake plants are bursting out of their pots, so she will be replanting them tomorrow – and I will be able to take one of the propagations home with me.

And today at the therapist's, I looked down and noticed a branch from the jade plant lying on the ground. The bottom part with the two fatter leaves was dead; presumably it’d been there for a while. But the top few leaves were healthy and alive, so I picked it up and brought it home, cut the tip with a sharp knife, and now it is reposing in the warm, dry area of my pantry. Chocolate bars are consistently a little gooey if I put them there, so I assumed it was a cozy enough spot to happily form a callous before trying the arduous work of rooting.

I don’t know what all of this means. Maybe I’m paying more attention, empowering myself to learn more, so I catch these things and take action instead of letting the opportunities pass me by. Maybe I believe I can nurture things where before I lacked that understanding, or maybe the space I created and held to care for another living thing is simply attracting life to itself, to be filled. But I am full of tiny surprises, my eyes and hands. I like to walk home now in this first sharp bite of spring; I see bulb plants like tulips and daffodils springing up everywhere, in their first blushes (mostly purple) of awakening. I’m almost afraid to go away on vacation right now; I will miss these tiny breaths of tenderness. These weeks are our reward for all of winter’s hardships.

For things found and lost, I hope to be astonished. In my head walking home today, Beck hauntingly, wakingly, sleepily, with a touch of sadness, sang to me that true love would find me in the end. I believe that – but I’m also pretty certain that when it does, it won’t mean quite what I think it means now.

I have been anxious lately, and hard on myself. Stressed that I wasn’t writing, scared that I was wasting any potential I may have. I’d planned treatises on Obama as a role model for the simultaneous promotion of mental, physical and emotional health, and another one on the end of winter and the certainty that my heart and I were moving forward, spinning in our orbit and in time, pressing inexorably on around the sun.

I read a book by Andrew Sean Greer called The Path of Minor Planets, and for the weeks I was reading it, my mind sparkled with the theory and metaphor involved. I thought in comets; I had reached my own perihelion. I felt myself returning. But his prose is the stuff of legend; I will dream about this book for years. The more I thought about my own paltry response, the more I was afraid of mediocrity, and ultimately I didn’t write at all. I failed to capture it; the feeling passed.

I worry all the time that I am not a genius. And I punish myself with my own disapproval when I am not good enough for me, which happens much more often than I would like. Perhaps some of the hardest work of all will be to learn how to distinguish between what I would like to be perfect and what I feel to be absolute necessity. I need to write. I love to write. I want to want to write, and not to dam things up, and to accept the frequent average when it comes in a torrent that may also yield something approaching perfection, at least in my own eyes.

To be fairest, clearest: I love to write when I find a clear and curving path to say whatever it was I felt I needed to say. I am rusty now, and tired. It’s hard to put things together in a way I would like if it isn’t science writing. Prose may not come as easily – certainly not if I don’t try. But I am writing. I am talking. I am trying, pulling myself out of the cold and darkness, slowly out of the ground, and into light.