House Plant

She requested a house plant for her 25th birthday. Not just any house plant, this was an exotic, biennially-flowering plant that required special care and for her to leave the plant with friends whenever she left town. Her mother was allergic to the leaves so it wasn’t allowed at either of her parents’ downstate lake houses where she spent the better part of her summer (she was a school teacher in America where children are only educated 180 days per year). An unplanned trip took the girl and her boyfriend south for the weekend so the house plant went to the care of a family friend who also had a plant like hers and so they were well acquainted with the lifestyle of high-maintenance plant owners.

Well her plant got sick, a common genetic disorder that affected the highly-selective species, causing it to drop leaves till it eventually died of malnutrition. The cure was common copper but only if it was treated soon enough. She received the call that the plant lost a leaf after she arrived downstate. It would be Tuesday before she could get back north, would [the other plant owner] please keep an eye on it and if it got any worse give her a call, if that would be possible, she wondered. The other plant owner reminded her that this was common but serious and should be looked after immediately, her little Verde barely survived a bout of the same last year. The girl chose to wait.

The boyfriend, coincidentally, had a tree in his childhood backyard grow ill from a landscaping mishap at the same time. The tree was old but beloved. In his youth they’d hung hammocks and tire swings and badminton nets from its thick trunk. No one had seen it ending this way, with all the history of a life well-lived taken down by failures of modern technology and inexperienced workmanship. The tree went fast and the boy wasn’t able to hug it one final time while its branches still swayed with life and its bark held the color of vigor.

At the stage at which the girlfriend’s plant finally saw a specialist it was nearly too late to save the poor thing. (The other plant owner had called several times but the girl stuck to her voluntary vacation schedule.) Her plant had lost most of its leaves and the remaining ones were yellow and rotten. The plant looked thin and miscolored. Her choices were complete soil and root transfer, which would save the thing if it took—but it may already be too late for that the specialist said—or compost. Even if the graft wasn’t outright rejected, there was a good chance the new root also carried the harmful genetic mutation and would need to be put on copper again.

Here it is worth noting that the girl’s parents were retirees at 60, having devoted their careers to corporate finance and changing jobs at every pay raise possible in lieu of shorter working hours or relocation. The girl was financially secure, could afford a down payment and healthy mortgage on a large starter home (even in this housing market), but she had immense reservations about paying $150 for a soil and root transfer on a two-year-old house plant she got for free. The boyfriend always had his doubts about her worthiness as the mother of a house plant she abandoned for three months each summer and this frugal unwillingness to save the thing had solidified his unease into contempt. Especially at a time he himself would give anything to save the dear old tree in his backyard. And her failure to see how her neglect caused this situation and how she so coldly could kill something living she was supposed to love when he [the boyfriend] was still grieving over the loss of something he loved was a tremendous wedge driving deeper between his young love for her and the idea that she was kind of fucked up and self-absorbed and possibly just dim-witted. All this clashed inside the boy’s head.

She went ahead and had the plant composted after several teary-eyed phone calls with her mother. The boyfriend was never consulted beyond being an object to lament the girlfriend’s suffering. The girlfriend walked out of the specialist’s with a mason jar of her dead plant that she immediately handed over to the boyfriend because she was overcome. It was surprisingly heavy and still warm. Why did this have to happen to her, she exclaimed. All she wanted was a bright house plant to greet her at the end of the work day and now she had nothing but dead dirt. The boyfriend considered this and accepted he could never criticize the way she handled the situation but that she would also never learn from it. This was somehow the saddest part. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that his fate would be the same as the organic matter in the glass jar: yearned for, paraded about, neglected, and ultimately turned into compost.