Root Bound

I have four surviving houseplants, and they are constantly near death. If cats have nine lives, my houseplants must have at least twenty.

My jade plant is a weak, spindly thing with all four of its branches lying on, rather than emerging vertically from, the soil. Half of my spider plant is the color and texture of straw. The third plant, a heretofore nameless codieum (I just looked it up), has't grown two inches in five years. A weeping fig in the living room, which we received as a gift ten years ago when Emily was born, has been revived from death more times than I can count. Yet somehow they hang on. They thrive on neglect, as the saying goes. It's quite an amazing thing.

Most houseplants are probably doomed to die, but as a kid I had a friend whose mother cared for a virtual arboretum in their living room. This same woman was deathly afraid of birds, which made me wonder if she grew plants indoors so that she would not have to go outside. I wish now that I had asked her why she was afraid of birds -- she might have had an interesting reason.

Most of the other private collections of plants I have seen have been less impressive by comparison. I thought it was just the nature of plants indoors to wither up, drop their leaves dramatically, and die.

Then I visited Aunt Billie's condo in Albuquerque. She does not have a background in agriculture. I've known her for 25 years and I've never heard her mention a plant of any kind. On her trips to Utah, she's never fretted about the houseplants she left behind, as far as I could tell. I've even visited her at home and failed to notice the giant potted jade plant and the enormous Christmas cactus, both of which are at least a decade old. She recently donated a third specimen of some kind, the real beauty of the group, she said, to a local gardening club (of which she is not a part) to be auctioned off as a benefit for their fundraiser.

She insisted she didn't have a secret but said her plants appeared to thrive in the southern exposure of the patio door window. I resolved immediately to move my plants closer to the window when I got home.

But first I transplanted them into larger pots and discovered that all of them were 'root bound.' The gnarled roots of one plant had crowded out the dirt so that it was practically hydroponic in its pot with no nutritional source. No wonder they were barely making it!

Which got me thinking today that I may be 'root bound' as well. Having roots is a good thing - I know it is. But I may have taken it too far.

I first realized the symptoms when we were shopping recently for a new van. Our old one had served us well for 185,000 miles. We'd taken it to 46 of the lower 48 states. But first the rack and pinnion steering went out, then a $350 pump. I would have held on (I can be extremely frugal!) but something started burning when it idled and the fumes would sometimes seep into the interior. I started getting headaches and imagining that the fumes were carcenogenic - I decided, reluctantly, that the van needed to be replaced. (Scott had come to this conclusion years earlier.)

When we started shopping, I said that I wanted to find the exact same van - same color, everything. But when we found a similar van, I balked. It seemed toooo familiar -- I needed a change. We'd had that van for seven years and we would likely have this one seven more -- that's 14 years with the same van, basically.

We also have a ten-year-old dog who could live up to 20 years and recently acquired its twin in puppy form -- that's 30 years with the same dog, basically.

I need a little variety! As the poet William Cowper said, Variety is the very spice of life.

I've been worrying about my memory lately. My husband and children laugh at me when I tell them that we can't replace the fake Christmas tree or the lawnmower because we just bought them, when, in fact, we bought them years ago. Back when things changed on a regular basis (children were born, we moved occasionally, we changed cars more frequently...) I could place events sequentially. "That happened when we were in the green Omni, so it must have been before Taylor was born..." - that sort of thing.

For the longest time now, everything has been pretty much the same. Conversations with far-flung friends and family usually begin with 'Not much. How 'bout you?"

I probably feel this way at the end of every winter. Imagine how I'd feel living in a place without seasons! I don't think I could handle the sameness of it all.