growing seed ideas

In the grocery store, one clerk waited at the checkout. The few shoppers were in no rush to be first in line. As I strolled into the grocery store, I passed a woman holding a plant. She was talking with a clerk.
I was pricing the bananas when she headed my way. The plant was now in the child carrier. She stopped and exclaimed, “We just got back from a short vacation. We were only gone a few days and just look at this plant.”
I looked.

“When we left, this plant was three times as big as it is now. Maybe that’s why all the rest of my plants are silk.”
“I know the feeling,” I said gently laying a bunch of bananas in my cart. “My thumbs are so brown they are black.”

I thought about that as I pushed the buggy around the store. Plants do not prosper under my care. It’s not for lack of trying, either.
Friends and family have given me beautiful plants. I put them in the sun or shade as directed. I add water. They all die a torturous death. The most devastating decline came to the potted plant with waving fronds. The cat trimmed it back better than Garfield.
My brown thumb is not genetic.

My grandmother always had a beautiful flower garden with beds of sweet Williams, bachelor buttons, irises and marigolds. Her son worn prizes at the fair every year with his hybrid dahlias. Through the long winters, he puttered with his flowers in a small green house.
The skill skipped my generation and wet to my son. He has the interest and the knack. He studied the gardening books that languished on our shelves and gently repotted the plants people gave me. He sighs deeply when he sees how I murder them. When he has to leave his plants at home he writes out long lists of instructions. My husband follows them, not me.
As I tossed another box of cereal in the cart, I realized even cut flowers fade faster under my care.

Yeah, I know what happens to plants left behind for the shortest of vacations. When I come home, the potted plants are dead and the silk plants are wilting.
As I entered the checkout lane behind the plant lady, I concluded I don’t know much about gardening.
As she wrote the check, she asked the clerk, I commented, “Anyone with children is always short on cash.”

She smiled agreement, looked at me and asked, “Are you the lady who writes in the paper?”

“Yes.”
“Where do you get all those ideas?”
I thought about my news clippings, the roots of an idea from a book and the grafting of comments at the grocery store. I cultivate seed ideas, watch them flourish and prune back the excess. I don’t have a brown thumb in everything.
“Oh here and there,” I replied. “In fact I picked up a few this morning.”


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