One time he told me he was glad I was a rose, despite my thorns, and I was glad that he could see the good in me, even though it could be buried sometimes. Knowing that he still cared for it gave me some odd comfort, like in a way he was still - peripherally, incidentally, at best - caring for me. I was jealous of how easily the plant seemed to grow. He had to repot it, he told me, a year after he moved, because it had exploded into dozens of huge dark green leaves, each as big as a catcher’s mitt - a sign of health I took to mean that he, like the plant, was thriving without me. He took the plant with him when he moved into his new apartment, where it lived between a big leather chair and his television, just under the window sill. We had been very intentional about having our own private writing spaces when we moved in together years before so I always felt like I shouldn’t enter the room when I watered the plant. I walked lightly on my toes when I entered his space even when he wasn’t there because it was, well, his room. Though it was in his workspace, I watered it weekly along with the other rubber tree that sat in our living room. It lived on the floor in a maroon pot between his bookshelf and the window. “Hitchcock shadows,” I said to him playfully more than once, as the light through the slats made stripes along his forehead and nose as I stroked his cheek with my fingers.Ī few years ago, the rubber tree my mother gave me got so big, I cut a couple of leaves and made another plant which sat in my husband’s office in our home. “You’re no shrinking violet,” he laughed, “that’s for sure.” I’ve thought about that a lot since we separated, about how we used to lie in our bed in the late afternoon on the weekends, the sun coming through the blond wood blinds. “You are a rose,” my husband told me once, stroking my hair, “inviting but thorny,” as though predicting some future hurt. Their smell is sweet and strong, sometimes pungent, the petals soft and silky. I’ve always loved roses, but who doesn’t? People pay up to $40 an ounce for the plant’s oil, picked and pressed by hand up in the hills of California, bottled up pretty and corked in small, precious, pink glass. It’s faded now to a soft pink, maybe even a light peach, almost as though to remind me that I’m getting old. I have a tiny rose tattoo near my hip, a seemingly rebellious act at age 19. I was named for my great-grandmother, and Rose is Shoshana in Hebrew, which is also my Hebrew name. It was fitting, she explained, because my middle name is Rose. Giving me a cutting, she told me, was a way to keep Aunt Rose alive. She had taken the rubber tree from her Aunt Rose’s home when Rose died. When my mother gave it to me, it had two small leaves. I don’t have a great track record with plants (or relationships, it turns out), but the rubber tree keeps growing. It’s done surprisingly well on the window sill that faces south in my living room in Chicago. It was a gift from my mother sixteen years ago. My friend Pat, who was two decades older than me, knew what to say, though or rather, she knew that she didn’t need to say anything at all, during the few months I spent with her, when I learned that tending to plants is really tending to oneself, and that all of it - the breakups and the plants and the people who do and do not get you - ultimately has to do with just getting old.īesides, I already had a plant, a rubber tree with eighteen smooth, shiny green leaves each the size of my outstretched hand, all with tiny diagonal veins. I’d been experiencing intense waves of grief, and I hate when someone tells me what they think I should do, especially when it’s self-serving - more to do with their discomfort at someone else’s pain - so they say things to make themselves feel better. But most people, it seems, just don’t really know what to say when you’re hurting. And the suggestion to get closer to nature when grieving was nice, of course. These pallid remarks weren’t personal, I know. “It will be good to get your hands dirty with soil,” she said. “Watering it will keep you from being depressed,” another friend mumbled as she left my apartment, gazing downward sheepishly. “It’s good to bring in new life,” one friend said tritely. It might have seemed appropriate, albeit a cliché, to get a new houseplant when my husband and I separated.
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