We’re soju-posting. There’s that really common adage that gets thrown around, “Write Drunk, Edit Sober.” It’s usually attributed to Hemingway, though apparently he never said that. And it seems stupid, but it’s Monday night and I haven’t had anything to do in hours so might as well try. I typically like the rain, but when the cornerstone of my personal project is public interaction, bad weather really limits my venue choices. Suppose I could go to a bar, but again, its 9:26 p.m. on a Monday night in a college town between semesters. Well, that’s cope, I could just go even if it’s empty. Then at least I’d be inebriated in a cool way.
I don’t really have a topic. I was going to write a post on novelty, but I don’t want to right now. It needs to fester a bit before the pus comes out, y’know. Probably tomorrow? Like I said, college town in summer break. Once the sun goes down people scatter back home and it’s just you and the streetlights. Which actually sounds great right now, but is inadvisable on account of both the rain and the apple-flavored Korean wine. We will stay inside.
I think a lot nowadays about repotting plants. I don’t own any house plants but the ritual of moving stalk and soil is pretty familiar to me. My sister has a natural green thumb, inherited from our deceased grandmother who shares absolutely zero blood with either of us. When my sister and I lived in the same city and she needed to go out of town, she would leave me a hand-drawn map of her apartment layout with tiny squares representing each planter. Using little brackets, she would group together the squares and scribble a little number underneath to show how many full watering cans would be needed to cover the section. At the time, and I could be embellishing through no fault of my own, I think there were around 92 plants in the apartment. Some would take a full can’s worth or more of water, some were small enough that a handful of them could be grouped together by the little brackets with an efficient “1” sitting underneath. The first time I watered my sister’s plants, it took an hour and a half. Sometimes, I think about that nursery localized on the third-floor of a rundown apartment in Birmingham. My sister has always had a great eye for, well for like of a better word, comfortable space. But I think it’s easy to take comfortable space for granted, from the outside looking in. I can’t quite remember the watering schedule, but at a conservative estimate and my pace, it would probably take at least 2 and a half hours a week to manage. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but I think as opposed to, I don’t know, something like cleaning, which can be slightly delayed due to mood or circumstance, you can’t really delay the watering of the plants. A week off and those fickle fuckers will just shrivel up and die.
My ex had a plant that was really silly. If it didn’t get watered right when it wanted, it would shrivel and slouch and point its leaves towards the ground, dejected at the obvious lack of attention. We would sit on the couch and giggle about the angsty little guy and then get up to get him a glass of water. It would only take about 30 minutes after watering for him to be perked back up- he would stand tall as ever, gesturing with his foliage that his previous state was in no way indicative of his nature and that we must be mistaken about what we saw. Triumphant and confident, he sat behind the double-wide couch in her apartment and enjoyed his vigor.
My ex had some house plants, not as many as my sister, on account of the light levels of the duplex she lived in. She would often lament about how crowded her one window in the kitchen was. Besides a sliding glass door at the rear of the living room, this little kitchen window above the sink was the only place for high-light plants. It was a good window, south-facing, but the ledge had to only be about two and a half inches in depth and maybe a foot and a half long. There were four plants up there at any given time- if a plant around the house started to look worse for wear, she would move it up to the ledge and let it recover. Whenever we went to the garden center at Home Depot or to a local nursery, we would quickly move past any plant that required high levels of light. “No space” she would say and we would both go back to searching for the less-demanding flora. On occasion, she would notice that her plants had outgrown their shells, and we would again trek out to the garden center to find new pots and soil (see, despite what you might think, the garden center actually has terrible pot selection, specifically if you want something clay and cute with drainage holes). Nevertheless, we would make a trip out of it and stop at some other stores in the area and get lunch, then return home with the new digs for her plants. As soon as we got out of the car, she would run in and grab the afflicted subjects and bring them to the stone stoop by her front door. With fingers like feathers, she would massage out the loose soil from the roots, dirt falling onto the ground, waiting to be rubbed into the knees of her pants. I was only allowed to try once or twice- she noticed my hasty work and shooed me away. “Plants are more resilient than you think, let me do it” I would think to myself. “Try harder to not break my shit” would be her response if she knew. Instead, she would politely insist on doing it herself and I would stand beside her, idly sweeping away the old soil into the lawn.
I made a rude comment to her post-breakup. “You put more care into repotting plants than you did into breaking this off.” I didn’t mean it. I meant it. I don’t know what I mean sometimes. On one hand, she was tender with those plants. She would dutifully loosen the soil from the roots, taking caution to not sever anything. She would place it into its pot and diligently scoop soil around the stalk until it was neat and even, like she was tucking a child into bed. I suppose I was bitter about that. Jealous of the chloroplasts and pistils. But I know, I try to know, I’m trying to know, that I am not a plant. That spiteful, bipolar bitch of a plant I mentioned earlier, the one that would wilt and rise at a moment’s notice, is not me. It doesn’t know why it wilts, it doesn’t know why it rises. It can ask for no explanation and even if it could, it wouldn’t affect its ebb and flow. The plant simply responds to stimuli. But I know why I wilt, I know why I rise, I know why the soil around my roots was shaken out with little regard for care. And this got me thinking, again, about repotting plants. Maybe putting more care into things that will never understand isn’t indicative of how much we care about the thing in itself, it’s how much we care about its effect. A bad job with repotting plants results in a dead plant. A bad job with a breakup results in a party being slightly more discombobulated than usual. And at the end of the day, the plant doesn’t know why he’s being moved, and I do. I think I’m sorry for saying that to her.
Plants, like relationships, familial, romantic, platonic, whatever, require dutiful upkeep. They require a notebook paper map with numbers and brackets and the gumption to water them, week by week, until the end.
jeez, louise 