Garden Girl

Newsletter 2024-02-08

My kid has a strange obsession. That sentence could apply to any one of my girls. I’m an all-or-nothing kind of person, and I passed that quality to my children. I’m honored that they inherited my worst attributes. My nine-year-old, Lucy, loves plants. I’m not sure how she picked that particular fixation. At her age, I was preoccupied with pigs because I was born on a hog farm that my family was forced to sell when my dad hurt his back, thus making it part of the mythical past to which I hoped to someday return. It’s not like Lucy was born in a greenhouse that we had to abandon due to unforeseen circumstances. Or foresee circumstances, for that matter. There was no greenhouse, period. We don’t even have a lot of plants in our home. There’s an aloe vera in one corner and some tiny cactuses on a window sill, but that’s it. Of all the random objects in our house, it’s weird that those unremarkable few would be the ones to consume her passions. Yet, the way she’s drawn to all things green is undeniable. When she was younger, we used to give her seed magazines that would show up as junk mail. She looked through them like a kid making a Christmas list from the Sears catalog. I hadn’t thought about those seed ads in a very long time. After all, that was toddler stuff. As a fourth grader, Lucy is practically an adult. She has her own phone and plays Xbox with me and my friends on Halo night. You can’t get much more grown up than that. But as with me and my weird affinity for pigs, I recently discovered that Lucy’s obsession with plants wasn’t a passing phase at all. It had merely lay dormant like a perennial waiting for spring. It all came to a head Wednesday night. Let’s hope she uses her green thumb for good instead of evil.