My mom collects dying plants the way some collect stamps and miniature figurines. Our house is scattered with varying degrees of brown and wilted stems that bow down so low to the ground it’s as if they’ve been carrying weight, and finally surrendered to its heavy load. Sometimes I begrudgingly accompany her on plant-gathering excursions. She moves past the lush, green ones swiftly as if they are invisible - only the wounded interest her. If she is lucky, she will find a few that are just close enough to death to keep.
Often I ask her why she collects such plants, though her answer never changes. She responds with, “why not?” She likes anomalies, likes things that exist but go unseen, like fish being born underwater.
I then point out the obvious. That these plants are ugly and take up too much room. Besides, I add, the fresh green ones are so much prettier.
She has no reply. She simply goes on collecting the fallen, curled leaves from the ground, catching them by the fistful, their crunch echoing across the silence and lingering in my ears even after I am far from home.
She has no reply. She simply goes on collecting the fallen, curled leaves from the ground, catching them by the fistful, their crunch echoing across the silence and lingering in my ears even after I am far from home.
She will spend weeks, sometimes months, watering them, rotating them between light and dark, and spraying clouds of heavy smelling pesticides, most of which make us sick. But, in the end, not many survive. She cannot save them, much in the same way she couldn’t save my father. So they sit – the dead among the dying and the dying among the dead – filling in nooks and crannies and growing out of walls and into each other, stretching and sweeping across the newly empty spaces.
Kamie Pamulapati is an underemployed English major from Wake Forest University and currently lives in Arizona, though she hates the heat and misses green grass terribly.