An Areca palm plant might revive your life.

An unexpectedly tender moment with a houseplant

My Areca palm plant that has withstood two moves and almost eighteen years.

For the month of March, my essays (which are considerably shorter than usual) will focus on variations of nature themes.

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What you don’t know is that potting an Areca palm seedling might revive your life.

I stood in line at the funeral home, dreading the moment I’d peer into the open casket and see Nicole’s face for the first time in weeks. She was twenty three when she died, a single mom of one boy—Kohen—who was not quite two years old. Nicole was my younger brother David’s fiancee when she flipped her car into a steep ditch late at night off a treacherous curve along a local highway.

I approached her mom, Terri, who stood stalwart and steady at the base of her only child’s casket. There were no words for a mother who lost her child, but I suspect the tears pooling in my eyes communicated everything to Terri, and she hugged me and said, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

I should have been comforting her, but I simply said, “I’m so, so sorry.”

Terri turned around and stooped to the ground, picking up a houseplant someone had gifted the family in honor of Nicole’s life. She handed it to me. “Here,” she said, “I want you to have this.”

I swallowed hard, then smiled, accepting her offering. When I returned home with the palm seedling, Ben took it from me, disappeared into our detached garage, and returned twenty minutes later with a freshly potted plant.

“Here,” he said, setting the pot on a plant stand he’d pulled from an abyss of discarded junk that we’d shoved in a corner of the garage. “I found this empty flower pot in Max and Jean’s front yard, by their trash, and I salvaged it a while ago. Makes for a decent home for your plant, don’t you think?”

Max and Jean were our eighty-year-old hoarding neighbors who owned about eight sets of everything. I chuckled and then moved the plant stand in front of an east-facing window. There it stood for almost nine years, branching its fronds so long and wide I trimmed them often. I told Ben it looked like it belonged in the jungle.

And now, seventeen years after Nicole’s death, my Areca palm remains a sturdy presence and a reminder that with every metaphorical death, something in me is revitalized.

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Your financial contribution helps supplement our family’s expenses and offset the costs of ongoing medical care for our daughter Sarah that requires 20 hours of unpaid caregiving on my part. I want you to know how much your support means and how it helps our family.

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Hey there! If you enjoyed reading this, won’t you take a moment to check out a few of my other related posts? I’d love it if you’d click on the heart, comment, and share what you love about them.

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