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By Kevin Carrel Footer
It is winter in Buenos Aires. Sniffles and puffer jackets are out in force. Laborers coming in from distant settlements on commutes that started long before dawn stomp the ground waiting for their next bus, the fake fur of their parka hoods shuddering with each stomp while they rub their hands and the vapor from their exhalations wraps their heads in wispy halos. Blessed be the hard-working.
It may be colder than we are used to, but the sun — oh the sun of Buenos Aires! — has stayed faithfully at its post bathing the city in an intense light whose color has been muted by its oblique winter journey through the atmosphere. This city was named for the winds that sweep over her but when the clouds are blown away, it is the sun and its warming rays that are revealed.
And it is those selfsame rays that stream through the panes of the French doors that give onto my balcony. And it is that light that ends its journey in the leaves of the plants that I have arranged just inside the glass to receive that nurturing gift.
—
I confess that I haven’t had much time for plants in my life. It was one of those passions I wished I had but I was always in a rush, chasing some more-urgent dream. I was never patient enough — and it remains to be seen if I am now — to slow myself down to their frequency. Because most plants move so slowly (kudzu excepted!) they are often confused with the inanimate world. But it is a problem of relative velocity: it is not that they are not moving at all but that we are moving too fast.
I consider my troubled relationship with plants a blemish on my character. To me, it is a tell-tale sign that something is askew, that I am too focused on something beyond me. Like meditation, plant husbandry eludes me.
What plants I did try to cultivate eventually died. Sometimes it was a lack of love: I’d forget to water them for months at a time. Other times it was too much love: I’d water a cactus until its roots turned to mush and there is nothing so demeaning as killing a plant that can survive the ravages of the desert but can’t survive you.
I could never get the balance right.
Too much.
Too little.
Never just enough.
—
This time it all started with a stolen stem.
Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, I admired the lush tresses of a pothos plant cascading from a vase on a shelf. In the afternoon sun, the leaves glowed a translucent lemony green. When no one was looking, I snipped a tendril from the plant between my fingernails and gently secreted it in my backpack.
When I got home, I almost forgot my bounty. But later, looking for a book in my pack, I discovered the stolen cutting. I plopped it into a glass of water and promptly forgot about it for the next month.
One day I noticed, much to my surprise, that not only had the cutting survived but it had grown a knot of tender roots underwater. Soon I was checking the roots every morning. I would hold the glass up to the window to see how much they had grown while I slept. It seemed a miracle that a plant could survive on just air, water and sunlight.
—
I have known some serious gardeners in my life. My father was many things but he was also a devout gardener whose first duty on returning home from his doctor’s office was to water the beds of plants he was cultivating. I would hear him drive up but if I didn’t want to wait half an hour to see him, I would run down to the garden and lend him a hand.
My brother-in-law is a landscaper who over the years got more and more picky about whom he would take on as a client. Eventually, he refused to work with anyone who didn’t relish getting their hands dirty in the soil every weekend.
That first cutting is now thriving in a pot of soil. Others have taken its place in water glasses along the sill, their roots a symphony of hopefulness. Some other plants, long left for dead, are coming back to life.
Lately, watching my little menagerie of plants and cuttings has become one of the great pleasures of my days. In a turbulent world, there seems nothing more heroic nor more life-affirming than the inexorable journey of a pale tender root reaching out for a new life.
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