How Getting a Houseplant Helped with My Divorce
When my plants thrived, the weight of my own grief began to lift
Two months after my wife left me, I found the baby palm tree.
Biking home from the açai bowl restaurant where I work during the day, I had been mentally bracing myself for the too-familiar emptiness of the apartment when I saw the little guy. Its stubby leaves poked defiantly out of a crack in the curb; I pulled over to inspect.
One of the tall palms that lined my Hollywood neighborhood had likely dropped it as a seed, and by chance, it had sprouted, half-buried in plastic wrappers and broken glass. I felt a surge of pity. Here was a survivor, destined to be choked out once it grew bigger. I felt a camaraderie with the tiny tree. I, too, was in survival mode, in a strange, unexpected place. Going inside the dusty, mausoleum-like apartment, I found a Mason jar and filled it with water, then hurried back to the curb and tugged the little seedling from its crevice. Its roots clung to the concrete, and for a moment I was worried its stem would snap. Suddenly, it came loose. I suspended it with a string, roots submerged, in the jar.
As the dirt on the seedling’s roots dissolved in little puffs sinking to the bottom of the jar, I felt the weight of my own grief.
