5
yea o

WVORK

 

~

The delayed gratification of house plants

Isabelle Orr
Entertainment Editor

 

fter moving to a new apartment, |

invited over a friend whose taste in
interior decorating runs unparalleled.
With a couple of throw rugs and an empty
photo frame, he can turn a cave littered
with animal bones from the Late Triassic
era into a clean, bright space suitable for
a home office. In contrast, my natural
inclination for sloppiness meant my past
rooms had a similar theme involving a lot

 

of garbage bags, crusted-over plates, and
mattresses on the floor.

I brought my friend over to my new
apartment, anxious to see what he would
think. He paused by the window, stroking
his chin thoughtfully.

“Plants,” he said. “I would fill this
entire room with plants.”

My friend, a bona-fide plant fanatic,
had been banned from buying any more
plants after he had let a sheer mass of
them grow to become a small jungle in his
living room. I had watched him frantically
compare ceramic pots on
Amazon as if he were buying
stocks overseas.

Personally, I had been
thinking something along the
lines of buying a decorative
pillow and calling it a day.

“T could never take care of a
plant.”

“All this space,” he said,
waving his hand with the
confidence of someone whose
concept of decorating wasn't a
pile of dirty laundry on a chair.
“You will get a plant. I'll take
you.”

Buying plants had
become popular in my social
sphere—or had always been
popular and I had missed the
memo. Lots of friends and
acquaintances had talked
about being “plant parents,”
something that seemed to me
like a waste of time and money.
Most of my disposable income
was spent on clothes or food,

Illustration by Cara Seccafien

things that gave me instant gratification
and a sharp burst of serotonin.

Over the past year or so, my friends
had slowly begun to work towards goals
that seemed as out-of-the-blue to me as
buying plants. One friend had settled
into a salaried job as a designer and told
me about her plans with her long-term
boyfriend.

“We might move to Victoria, buy a
condo there,’ she told me over brunch.

“Back to the island?” We had both
attended high school in Nanaimo and
moved to Vancouver to escape a town
where the only activity was drinking ina
gravel pit.

“To be closer to my parents.” My friend
had driven us to brunch in her Kia Soul.
“And David really wants kids.”

Children? I started hyperventilating
into my hash browns. She wasn’t my only
friend with plans for her future—another
had decided to start marine training to
become a deckhand, one was a nurse with
a five-year plan that included two sons
and a daughter, and another was finishing
his master’s and becoming a professor. In
contrast, I once wore a full-piece bathing
suit to work under my clothing because |
had run out of clean bras and underwear.

The people around me had collectively
held a meeting while I was in the bathroom
and they'd decided to start doing things
with their lives. I felt adrift in half-baked
plans. I thought I might go back for my
master's degree, teaching degree, or
travel abroad. I was never sure enough of
anything to move towards any concrete
goal.

I went to meet my friend at the

greenhouse, squeezing through the aisles
of plants.

“This one is good for low light,” he
explained. “This one needs direct sunlight.
And this one needs sunlight, but not
directly, and not too strong. And only once
a week in the winter, but every third week
in the summer. And you'll need to buya
bigger pot and repot it when it begins to
grow, otherwise it'll run out of room and
strangle itself”

The concepts of math and
responsibility made my head spin. I
couldn't take care of this plant. I couldn't
even take care of myself! It would die, small
and brown, and I would have to bury its
sad corpse in the backyard like the dead
hummingbird my childhood dog brought
me.

My friend saw me start to panic. He
grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me
like a doll. “Isabelle,” he said. “Just water it.
It will take a long time to grow. It doesn’t
happen just like that.”

The long fronds of a two-foot-tall,
spiky fern grabbed at my hair as I walked
by. Each leaf was striped with three
different shades of green. I checked the tag,
which read TROPICAL PLANT and didn’t
help me in any way.

My friend grabbed a frond and
inspected it. “This one is good.”

I lugged it 15 blocks home and put it
at the end of my dresser near the window.
Outside of my room, my friends were
falling in love, finding careers, and making
their lives their own.

I watered my plant. We both needed
time to grow.

Basketball day (20th): A stream of consciousness

Vlad Krakov
Contributor

 

annot remember what I did in the

morning but in the afternoon I bussed
over to Anna’s to pick my stuff up and
more generally to hang out. Jenna and
Brenda and Bobby there too. Beautiful
sunny hanging-out-in-lush-backyard day.
Anna looking so cute in gold-rimmed
glasses which I’ve never seen before and
really dug, there on the kitchen counter
sorting her life out through this device
(her future starting-school-in-montreal
life) as those with less worries lounge just
outside and Jessica beloved sister looks
for food and they share strawberry beer
and laughter. Anna furthermore looking
into same Ayn Rand essay competition
which I had earlier been interested in and
after reading The Fountainhead angrily
rejected, so I warned her of the dangers
that lay therein. Afterwards we biked to
meet up with her French friend Theo and
to look for available basketball court to play
basketball, biking all around magnificent
upper east side bc at elemntary school the
courts occupied by strange on-the-concrete

yoga class, and other parks occupied
already by basketballers, until finally we
arrived at Van Tech highschool of which I
have distant memories too bc Jennie went
to school here... And all the while on my
bike (Anna’s bike technically, mine still
trapped in my garage locked up bc I lost the
key) my sleeping bag and tent and tarp all
bungie-corded to the back be I'd left them
at Anna’s a couple weeks ago so I looked
(and felt!) like a rover, a wanderer, living
humbly and simply off in my bike-and-tent
way. In summary we biked around alot and
played basketball in two different places,
Van Tech and Trout LAke Park, playing
both bump and three-on-three bball with
someone always sitting on the sideline (be
7 of us, with Skye sweet humble Skye) and
cheering and making funny commentary
or otherwise out of hot baking sun into

the cool shade of the narrow hallways

of the school, where the squeaking of
sneakers upon baskerball court echoing

for they were playing inside as well, the
highschoolers I mean, and friendly Filipino
janitor says warmly, “Feel free to come in,
to get water, you need it, it’s real hot out.”
and I utilize now-tiny water fountain and

urinals and tiny stairs and tiny hallways
and when we're tired of basketball we play
hackey sack (which I kick on roof and we
have big fun ordeal of first hoisting up Skye
and then Bobby up there, in the process
Skye holds up my hand as we hoist her up
in tender moment) and bike around some
more until finally we are sitting in Trout
Lake park just exhausted and hot, so hot
wanting to get naked, with our slurpees
from Husky in our further attempt to
recapture our childhoods, which although
I did not know the Van TEch team in
Marpole childhood is essentially the same
as mine, same tropes of rushing around
on bikes and saying howdy to Jenna’s
mother as we pass by house and she’s
gardening there and she yells out “Have
you all got your helmets?” But only four
of seven do and we bike away laughingly
and guiltily and just generally terrorize the
neighbourhood and even Skye who makes
big mature adult mistake of DRIVING to
Van Tech to play basketball with us (with
two White Spot coworkers who see us and
want no part in our childhood fun) and
promptly drives back to get bike, and yes
us recreating that shared yet not shared

Vancouver childhood and introducing
foreign Theo to all of it (his first slurpee)
and at the end of it we sit there hot as hell
among all these other people sitting there
too, also tired from playing basketball or
otherwise just lounging in park with picnic
blankets and musics, and all of us silently
sitting observing sky (and I observing Skye
observing sky) and resting with nowhere
to be except perhaps getting home in

time for dinner and the world warm and
comfortable and all us silently proud of
our achievement, that we have recaptured
the summer essence of our bike-riding

and running-into-school-for-some-water
childhood, and I personally so excited and
so warmed and so inspired that humble
happy Anna has shown me that such days
are still possible, basketball-and-slurpee
days, in your twenties, with everyone
wearing simple tee-shirt and shorts and
sneakers or otherwise sandals just as in
childhood, things I have forgotten after so
many glum nights with fashionable Ernesto
and Karl, and luckily I had left my sneakers
at Anna’s too so I could fit right in. Anna, I
will remember this big red letter Basketball
Day.