a story

Last Sunday Ann brought me to a plant nursery in a neighborhood not far away. It’s a very cool nursery, kind of expensive, and on Sunday I bought a four-inch plastic pot and its partner saucer, as well as a small bag of potting soil. I also got to pat the fur of a kitty sleeping cozily in a box on the counter. Upon return here I transplanted a house plant – a slightly variegated pothos – which I’d bought at a small plant store in OB two years ago to keep me company in the room I was renting in Golden Hill. Since Sunday that plant has expressed its thanks for a new-found spacious freedom for its roots, and brand new nurturing with the organics of the potting soil, repeatedly. Thank you, Buddy, I’ve heard it say on my ways in and out of this room we call the studio – a rather hopeful name.

Yesterday I returned to the nursery and bought a small plant, and a wicked belated house-warming gift for Ann, and got to pat the kitty again – different counter, same box. When I was younger – 20’s, 30’s, 40’s – I spent a lot of time in nurseries, mostly in Massachusetts, a place called Lexington Gardens a favorite, and in which I spent weeks and weeks and years and years worth of joyful hours. That nursery, about which there was a PBS television show, was just down the street from the home of a young woman who grew up there, in Lexington, and for whom I was crazy about at Salem State College, when either of us were bothering to be there. Her name was Frannie. Many years ago I went on a search to try and find her again, and discovered she had passed away from a drug overdose thing in the mid-nineties, I think in Las Vegas.

Yesterday I was happy to find the kitty still alive and well and quite sleepy, and have the money to buy Ann her overdue present, and me another little house plant.

It’s a story.