The story is that before I was born an office colleague gave
my father a Jade plant leaf. The leaf sat in a glass of water on the windowsill
above the kitchen sink in Kendall Park, and by the time I was born it had
sprouted a small set of hairy, white roots. On leaving Kendall Park, to accommodate
our growing family, the leaf was wrapped in a wet paper towel and deposited in
one of the many moving boxes. When we arrived in Rhode Island the leaf was
eventually retrieved and planted in the dirt of a small clay flowerpot. Having
moved several times myself I find the wet paper towel survival story to be
somewhat improbable, but not outside the realm of possibility. In any case, I have
very early memories of that first Jade plant in a corner of the dining room and
of a second Jade leaf sitting in water above the kitchen sink. They were watered
regularly and periodically repotted and they grew into glorious bonsai-style
trees which outlived him and are still alive today.
In my house we have one houseplant, a Christmas cactus. It
has been with us a long time. I forget if it had to travel in the moving van but
if not we bought it shortly after we moved in. It sits in the original plastic
pot on a narrow windowsill in our too-small kitchen and I have never repotted
it, just like we have never redone the kitchen. Still, I water it regularly and
it is not unhappy. In fact, it blooms quite reliably at Christmas, lending an
authentic festive note to the celebrations alongside the hothouse Poinsettias and
the stiffening corpse of a Pine tree.
Arvind’s Biology class has been studying Mendel
and tonight his homework involved Punett diagrams. Calculating the matrix
cross-products takes him only an instant, but drawing and quartering the
squares is a hard, laborious task. I watch his hands as he works and outside of the nails bitten down to the quick his fingers are precisely like mine.