by Kathleen Small

Created on: June 20, 2007

A Memoir of Ferns and Acceptance

All my life I have coveted the kind of magic that gardeners wield. Every time I disposed of another sun-charred basil plant, another withered tomato stalk, another empty pot of dirt that never yielded a single shoot, the failure burned me, and I wished I could nurture things that couldn't be cooed to or scratched under the chin with my gangrenous thumb.

Luckily, I live with my boyfriend in a sunny corner apartment in a renovated women's shelter in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and in the year that we've lived there, Ryan and I have opened our home to two kittens dubbed Nero and Augustus, innumerable books, magazines, knick-knacks, doodads, chochkies, dust bunnies, and the occasional panic-stricken mouse, but not a single plant. In my house, plants meet the same fate as does a mouse in my kittens' claws. I once drowned a water lily.

Ryan's mother is a passionate gardener with a taste for the meticulous chaos of English gardens. She's the kind of woman who bakes things from scratch and laughs at your jokes when no one else will, and, in an effort to impress her, during my first visit to Washington I followed her into her garden to help her pot some ferns on a gray early morning. The kitchen window had been cranked open, and I could smell the fresh coffee still drizzling into the carafe. The men of the house lay sprawled and snoring; three gray-bearded cats curled comatose on the sofa. The stage was set for some profound bonding. Then it all went hideously wrong.

As I pulled on my gloves and said, "Beautiful morning, isn't it? Shall I start with this one?" Kristy whirled around and jumped.
"Oh!" she cried, "You startled me, I-" her eyes landed on the gardening gloves I'd borrowed from the garage. Her face paled. She gulped. "You wanted to help me?"

"If that's alright," I said, beginning to sense the first inkling of awkwardness. I convinced myself that it was not dread I saw widening her eyes. After all, this was a woman whose presence transformed Saddam into Oprah, tempests into warm tropical breezes. This was a woman who milled her own flour. Plus, it wasn't as though she could sense my dark history as the well-meaning Mengele of the plant world. She couldn't just say "no, it's not alright."

"Well, no. It's not alright."

"Oh... okay," I said, my body suddenly unaware of how to position itself. "I'll just walk around the place a little and, you know, see if there's any garbage to pick up. Or dead birds to bury. If you want anything-" The unfinished

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