#340 Hope

Before Jay died, I had almost an arboretum in the diningroom, livingroom and bedroom.  The back walls are almost entirely glass, facing southwest, making for wonderful sunset views, and plants love it.  There were four huge spider plants, a ten-foot five-stem dracaena, a variegated hoya with eight-foot tight ropes looped back over themselves, a large constantly blooming crown-of-thorns, a nine-foot schifflera, and several more.  On the deck, there were planters on the railings with marigolds and portulaca, and pots of geraniums that I would bring in every winter, so they got huge and glorious.

During the last year of Jay's illness, they got very little care, but everything still struggled through.  After he died, they got no care.  I could hear them screaming, but I just didn't care.  Most of them died.  I left them.  Dried stalks  and brown leaves.  That's another thing I have to do before I can have company - get rid of the dead plants.  The schifflera in the bedroom has survived, looking a bit distressed, and the hoya, and the crown of thorns, but not much else.

I don't go out on the deck anymore, haven't in years.  It's too hard, plus Thunder wants to go out when I do, and then she jumps up on the railing and then down twelve feet to the ground, so I don't let her out, and then she shreds the curtains in frustration.  There has been nothing but weeds on the deck for four years.

I was sitting at the sewing machine in the bedroom hemming a dress today - I have to hem everything, and usually I do it at night.  A branch of the schifflera had pushed against the translucent vertical blinds, and created a gap in the blinds.  From my seat at the machine, I could see one of the deck planters.  It was full of brilliantly blooming red portulaca.

I swear they weren't there last year.

I guess there is hope for New Orleans, and hope for me.

~~Silk