The Christmas Cactus

The Christmas Cactus

At the end of June, one of the two 6 x 8 window panes in my husband’s and my apartment imploded from the torrential power of straight-line winds. Glass, acting like pieces of shrapnel, gouged the wood in our kitchen floor and table and decapitated the row of plants beneath the shattered window. The plants’ chopped leaves were blown as far as the glass shards (the latter were discovered beneath our office door), and rain lashed through the hole where glass used to be, fluttering the few blinds that had survived the blast. The wind’s force shoved up numerous tiles of the apartment’s drop-down ceiling, exposing streamers of pink insulation that looked like decorations for an end of the world party.

For days afterward, my husband and I wore shoes to avoid stepping on glass woven into the fabric of the carpet and found specks of potting soil in the oddest places: microwave, fridge, cabinets, and stove. As we put our apartment and our life back together, I found that what I mourned the most was not the mutilated kitchen table that had been a wedding gift from my in-laws or the kitchen floor that was spongy and warped from the water that had saturated too deeply into the boards to dry, but the house plants I had kept alive through four years of college and numerous week-long road trips, through attacks of spiders mites and aphids. In one fell swoop, over half of them were destroyed, so I carried the mortally wounded plants down to our store’s warehouse and unceremoniously dumped them into the industrial-sized trashcan. I was about to toss the Christmas cactus that had been a gift from my mother when I lifted the severed leaves and peered down at the plant’s base. Although the potting soil sparkled with glass and over half the plant had been squashed flat, I realized that the cactus might be salvageable. I plucked glass pieces from its leaves and soil and watered the pot in the store’s sink. I then carried it back up to our apartment and set it in front of the other 6 x 8 window pane that was not boarded up from the implosion and decided it was up to the cactus to either perish or survive . . .

To read more, visit me at Kellie Elmore’s beautiful blog, Magic in the Backyard, where she graciously invited me to share my guest post.