In between - #143

Snow and plants.

We are in the in between — the leaves fallen, the flora at rest. The clouds have returned, snuffing the sun from the mountain peaks. It still blazes hot on the skin, but the breeze is busy undermining her shine. 

The snow has fallen, and it feels clean. This snow never sticks, but it’s certainly threatening to. I There are only a few exterior chores that I didn’t get done in time, and we still have some 40 degree days ahead to accomplish them. Winter is only making plans in November. She doesn’t stick around until later.

But there was enough snow to take the first skate ski of the season. This is only my third season skate skiing. I didn’t live somewhere you could skate ski with any regularity until I was 35. But in one full season, one truncated pregnant season, and one season consisting of one day so far, it has become one of my favorite hobbies. I’ll never race competitively, I’ll never get sponsored, I have no delusions of even being very good at it. In the windless snowscape, sun high and branches heavy, there wasn’t a sound but my gasping breath. When I am out there, pausing on the track to catch my breath, I am not on deadline, I am not reading news, I am not afraid. When my sweat freezes against my skin, all I am is an animal.

And I really needed to feel like an animal this week. Maybe that’s also how I ended up with yet another plant. 

A few weeks ago, I was at my favorite nursery some 70 miles from here picking up a few starter succulents for a table arrangement I wanted to make. I couldn’t resist the siren call of the big plant section. I would just take a walk through, just a little peek to say hello. That’s when I saw her: this majestic bird of paradise, her tallest leaf curtsying to my chin. She was one of the few larger plants left as the nursery prepared for winter, and she was marked down to $50.

“No,” I told myself. You do not have the expendable income to be buying a large plant. Leave the store.

I did. I’m sure you can guess what happened. That lonely sale plant haunted my dreams. It was all I could think about every time I was in the living room because several months earlier, attempts at rescuing a Chinese Fan Palm had failed and we were left with a blank space in the rotation. Still, I resisted.

Until the Thursday after election day when, for something to do with our listless clobbered selves, we drove to the big city, and I asked to go to the nursery.

The nursery itself felt like some kind of good will bastion: pride flags intermingled with Christmas trees, everyone cheerfully stocking shelves, a woman with green hair carrying various plants around, a man who looked like he fell out of a Wyoming Chevy dealer commercial opening the door for us, and the wet comforting air of cared-for plants. 

But best of all, the bird of paradise. She had been moved, shoved into a now even smaller section of large plants, but it was her and I leaned over to touch my nose to the tip of the bowing leaf. She needed a home, and I needed to feel a burst of connection. In the car she went, reaching a leaf over to the baby, sheltering the napping dog. 

And so the week passed, snow and plants, calamity and continuity. There are enough good takes out there, and I am not well-slept enough to write one. But I will say this: there is a white man in my house. He’s blonde with blue eyes, and he seems to think he owns my body. He screams at me, he grabs me, he won’t let me leave the house for more than two hours at a time. He is 26 inches tall and about 223 months away from voting, but there he is. And there, clutched in his tiny, clammy hands, is the future. That future will always hold calamity and continuity, but it’s my job to make sure it also includes snow and plants. 

Here’s hoping, here’s fighting — may this only be the in between until a bright and better future.