My plants are infested with scale. Each day, I conduct the botanical equivalent of a lice-check, scraping off and squishing the tiny translucent bumps. If I relax this routine, even my giant jade (it’s central trunk six inches in diameter) will loose its leaves and die. The fronds of my asparagus fern, much like the strands of my own hair, will become increasingly brittle and loose their color. The spider plants, transformers of urban pollutants and apparent hosts of the sticky pests, continue to thrive. I suppose I should get rid of them, launch them into the trash all with their cracked pots and scabs. It is telling of something that I avoid this obvious fix. 

A still life: Peach crate filled with children’s books inside the bay window. Wooden toys on top and the pruned bits of jade I piled there; the jade my father gave me, which is perennially sick but otherwise thrives; a wilty basil plant in a too-shallow pot; one stock seedling in a plastic pot from Renny’s sitting on a plate.

I look out the window at barn-red vinyl siding, a dryer vent with its linty shadow, a snow blower covered with leaves, a heavy-duty trash can. I am soothed by some thick green mold growing on the brick foundation. It is probably an allergen, but I imagine its tiny organic landscape as distant hills or a hayfield.

My desktop is the Labrador coast, my bookshelf equivalent of top-shelf vodka a small but carefully curated New England Studies collection.

The landscape I love is shrinking and receding out toward the edges. I am casting lines of connection. I am hooking the bits that I will eventually grow into a worthy life. It is not a matter of aesthetics alone. Beautiful materials function better; it does not have to be the other way around. I prefer my screen door framed in wood, my light from actual flame, my evening coming slowly as the day creatures hand off their noisemaking to the night creatures. It is possible for a lifetime to pass in one summer day.