growing season
In the window, the orchid’s petals drop, crisp and thin, like elegant parchment cut-outs piling in drifts on the sill. Their rose hue has faded to ivory; they age like paper, but far more quickly. I cup my hand, sweeping in the soft, dead things, murmuring about the loss of another fragile life.
“I wonder if it’s not getting enough light now,” I say to Zoe, who sits nearby, head bent over a notebook, computer glare lighting the apples of her cheeks. Zoe gave me the orchid for Mother’s Day, and for months, I have absorbed the plant’s austere beauty, admiring its poise, the perseverance of its thick crop of delicate blooms. How do they last so long? I’d wondered this more than once. And then, just a few days ago, Kevin and I had commented on the change in the sun, or rather, in our orientation to it.
“Mmm?” Zoe looks up, jerking an earbud out of her ear, roused from academia by the sound of my voice.
“I said, ‘I wonder if it’s not getting enough light,'” I reiterate, gesturing toward the orchid.
She glances at the window sill and shrugs, then smiling, replaces the earbud. This is what it is to talk of growth with the abstracted and apathetic.
I sigh, looking again at the plant, assessing the slow progress of deterioration. This will not be the first fragile life I have snuffed. Orchids, in particular, seem too particular for my intuition. The blooms have dropped rapidly in the last few days, until now only two remain to keep the naked stems from complete baldness. The leaves look happy, though; they swoop broadly at the base, swelling healthy green–no scars, withering, or discoloration. The orchid does not look like a dying plant. I trace my finger through the air along the strong curve, remembering the potential for injury bound up in my own hand.
“You don’t look to be sick,” I say to the leaves. “So why are you dropping your blooms?”
I turn away from the window and pick up my phone. Google, the great and mighty Oz, will know. Zoe arches an eyebrow, glancing up again at me, reaching tentatively again for her earbud. I wave her off, dismissively. I type orchid losing blooms in the search box and smile as the question, “Why is my orchid losing its blooms,” pops up in bold below the querying cursor.
“Yes, that,” I murmur, clicking on the question.
Google quotes the delightfully informative myfirstorchid.com, “If this is your only concern your orchid is fine. It’s not dying, it’s just preparing for next year’s blooms by growing new roots.”
Ahh. I smile, delighted to discover this wisdom. “It’s not dying!” I exclaim this to Zoe’s bowed head, to the dangling, brassy curtain of hair over her cheek.
“Huh?” She says with a subtle touch of sharp impatience, jerking the earbud loose again.
“It’s not dying! It’s preparing next year’s blooms! How cool is that?!” I recognize my overzealousness, but I am unguarded, having set the observation aside. I feel thrilled over my absolution and with it, the reminder that winter’s dormancy need not portend finality. The unending story of resurrection makes me giddy, again.
“Oh, good,” Zoe says with a nod, carefully cloaking her disinterest. Her mouth, though, it shrugs.
Undeterred, I continue, cheerily. “It needs to be re-potted though. But I can do that.”
Zoe nods again, offers me a wonky, okay-whatever-mom smile, and replaces the earbud.
I smile at her head and turn back to my reading. The orchid needs fresh soil, I read, and then a few days to “get used” to its new environment. I will need to boldly prune old stems to so that new ones can grow and bear new blooms. These new stems will need to be staked, for support. Growing orchids takes patience, the site says, and I’m thinking not only patience but some pretty drastic, shocking steps. If I want this orchid to thrive, I’ll have to uproot and cut and clean and resettle it in fertile ground, but grow, it will. Because the Plan, the expectation, of new fruit already lies hidden in its roots.
“Okay, we’ve got some work, you and me,” I say to the orchid now, tapping my fingers against the tin pot, imagining what the orchid would say about all of these rude changes, if it could think and answer in turn. And then I wonder why, in my own desire for growth and new fruit, I so often miss the living Truth playing and replaying right in front of me.
