I’ve had this stupid plant for years, and it refuses to get healthy.
When I first got it, it was so symmetrical, so green… now it’s all eaten up, and a bit sickly-colored, as if I stashed it inside a closet for a month.
I re-potted it. Still nothing. Soil change. It only got uglier. I split its stalks into two pots. Both of them not doing well. Bug repellent, plant food, and I’m broke. Why did I even buy this?
Add to that the weeds.
They showed up in spring, small nondescript sprouts. I figured they were just small guys, that they’d die off, like they usually do when you get sprouts in pots on your porch.
Nope. These guys were troopers.
The little plants got bigger and bigger, sucking up the nutrients of my poor sickly plant. I went to them with scissors and reached out – and couldn’t follow through. After all, they were just living how they could. Who was I to decide they should die?
So my cat killed two of them for me. One left. Well that’s not so bad.
Still a weed though. Bristly. Not soft on the eyes. Nothing but a thick ugly stalk. I’ll just grow him till he dies, I think.
And by now I feel so bad about the weed, that I’ve forgotten about the plant whose pot he is sharing.
Skip ahead a few weeks. Come outside and find this:
Guess he wasn’t a weed after all.
How did he and his fallen brothers even get here? Is this the kind of seed I fill birdfeeders with? But this plant wasn’t even under my birdfeeder. The mystery goes on.
One thing is for sure: this winter, I’m planting my spoiled plant by the river. It can live or die outside, as it pleases; it never loved me anyway.
But if the weed happens to stay alive long enough, it can come inside for the winter. If not, at least he taught me that mercy has a place in the world.