or: how I inadvertently gave my grandmother herpes

There are certain things that happen to you, things that let you know time is passing, that let you know you are getting older, wiser, experienced.

I have a funeral plant under my care.  A plant that my teacher (the teacher I had in the "gifted" program because I was such an "exceptional" child and was one of the kids who was yanked from regular classes to sit with other "exceptional" children and brainstorm and think creatively and abstractly while the rest of you nosepickers sat in neat little rows learning about... about... about... what?  It was always a mystery to us what the heck you all were doing in there while we were building circuits out of root vegetables, spit, and 9volts we brought in from our dads' junk drawers and tool boxes.  We guessed you were playing.  What did you guess we were doing?  Intellegence segregation is one of life's greatest mysteries.) sent to the funeral home for my grandmother's services. 

She came, by the way.  My teacher.  A few of my old teachers came, my grandmother was a librarian in the school district.  It was amazing to see them.  They're still old.  They were always old.

So, I have a funeral plant under my care because I wanted it because I truly loved the woman who picked it out special for my grandmother's funeral. 

I feel that it is a bigger responsibility than it probably actually is.  Like there should be a badge or title involved.

Lora: Funeral Plant Care Provider.

Keeping a plant alive. 
A death plant.
Keeping a death plant alive.

Four death plants actually, a philodendron, something palmish and spiked tall, something that looks like the top of a pineapple, and something with heart-shaped pinkish leaves, all jammed together in a white bowl that I'll probably put fruit in if the plants don't make it.

I have it on the window sill.  I tried to leave it with my mother because after the initial plant snatch and grab I doubted my ability to follow through with caring for this thing, but she brought it to Philadelphia when she was here for Halloween.  She's good with plants.  Me?  Fifty-fifty.

So, I jammed some of those plant food sticks in there, and I try to water it once in awhile.  Basically whenever someone leaves a glass of water in the living room I dump it in there before taking the cup out to the kitchen.  I turn the bowl every day, so it gets adequate sunlight on all sides.  Every day that I remember.

It sort of dried out and wilted today.  Maybe yesterday.  Maybe the day before that.  It is half behind the Christmas tree, so I half forgot about it. 

I panicked, the way I do. 

As if my actual grandmother had somehow gotten jammed over there on the windowsill, behind the Christmas tree and had drooped.  As if someway, somehow that plant is my grandmother, as if a tiny piece of her spirit leaked out of her soul and went into that plant so part of her can stay and watch over me and it is my duty, as her first-born grandchild, mother of her first-born great-grandchild to keep this small, green part of her alive so that she may live on in my house as well as in my heart.

So I grabbed something.  A water bottle that was left here.  Left here by someone with an active cold sore, which is why I didn't drink it myself.  I put it up so no one would drink it, so I could dispose of it properly, with one of those sealed red hazmat bags.  Not thinking clearly, I poured the water on the plant and immediately gagged. 

Gagged due to the coldsore germs which have probably multiplied ten-fold in the moist threads of the screw-top water-bottle cap and are no doubt working their way through the fragile root system of the death plant right now, infecting the delicate leaves and radiating through the air that all who enter my home will breathe in a sickening bi-genus photosynthetic circle of floral to faunal life support.  Houseplants have wormed their way in as a domestic staple, under the guise of cleaning the air and improving oxygen quality in the living spaces.  And I go and do something like this.

This is why I shouldn't be trusted with anything living that won't scream for my attention if I've turned away for too long.  Not because I'll give it a raging herpectic infection, per se.  But because I'll lose sleep thinking about the damage I may have caused by introducing biogenetic terror cells to lifeforms that have, for eons, been separated from mass destruction on a viral level.

Has anyone ever tried those little glass bulbs that you fill with water and jam in the soil so the plant sucks water as needed?  I'm thinking I should probably pick some of those up next time I'm standing near the As Seen on TV! endcaps at the drugstore.