Good Lord: A Houseplant Story

The long, curving driveway between tall trees was lovely. The ring of pines around the house made the yard feel like a cathedral. But it wasn’t those things that caught me. Just as I put the car into Park, a momma deer and her fawn peeked around the corner of the house and looked at me quizzically. That was it. My sister was with me, helping me search for a new home. Seeing the deer, she inhaled in delight and said, “Oh, this is your house!” She was right. Within hours, my husband and I had made an offer and had it accepted. Now here we are, neighbors to those sweet deer. Having thrown over the old life we knew, we still wonder, some days at least, What have we done?

Bruce and I are writers. We spent our working lives teaching literature and writing. We entered retirement conservatively, decided to stay quietly where we were. There were strong plusses. We had unlimited time to write. We still had our networks of friends and continued ties to the college. But family beckoned. We decided to make the move closer to my hometown in the UP of Michigan.

We took a deep breath and listed our home—no idea about how it would go, given the uneven market. Three days later, we had our answer. We sold, and we had mere weeks to vacate, and no house to move into. Our dog doesn’t travel well, so Bruce stayed home with her and sent me on a mission. “Buy a house,” he said. Good Lord. Just buy a house, without his seeing it?

One does what one needs to do. I put my hands to the steering wheel and headed to Michigan for my sister’s help. Now, after endless packing and unpacking of boxes, Bruce and I are settled in this little house in the Northwoods of Wisconsin: lakes, woods, tourists, no-nonsense locals.

I like that about Wisconsinites. No use wasting words—you get what you see. It’s a style familiar to me, part of my social DNA. My first years away from home were spent in Wisconsin. I crossed the border after high school and did my undergraduate study at the University of Wisconsin, finishing at the Madison campus.

It was the post-Viet Nam era. The campus milieu wasn’t just long hair, flower-blossom necklaces, and funny cigarettes. There was a sense of activism. The state of the world was up to us, and we’d better pay attention. What I was learning in the classroom gave me a map for figuring the world out. Since 1894, the UW has referred to it as “sifting and winnowing,” seeking out the best of human thought, following the facts in the search for truth. I left campus believing that it’s what lives are meant to do.

Sounds so academic, doesn’t it?

Well, I saw the same “cut the crap” approach when I was growing up. My high-school-educated father, who earned his pay by pulling ore out of deep-shaft mines, was born and raised in northern Wisconsin, and he didn’t suffer fools or foolishness. But it wasn’t just stubbornness. If my dad didn’t know something he needed or wanted to know, he’d find out. He was no stranger to books.

As familiar as Wisconsin feels to me, sitting here now all these years later, a question looms. Will it be a place for me, still, and again, looping back as I have done now, from a lifetime spent elsewhere? The girl who left Wisconsin was twenty-four—the woman returning, almost fifty years older.

Things got real once our offer on the new house had been accepted. Bruce and I, seventy-ish and feeling our age, were suddenly faced with moving a state away. We’re self-sufficient types (another thing I learned from my dad). We decided we’d do our own packing, just the two of us, then hire professionals to put it all into a truck and drive it to the Northwoods. We had already downsized once before, after we’d retired. How hard could it be?

Yes, for folks our age, bone-crunching. Stooping, twisting, lifting, from one task to another, day after day, all day long.

We began by donating books to the library. Books are a source of light for an English teacher, and hard to let go of. Our shelves were filled with light. We drove carload after carload of clothing and household goods to a nearby donation center. The question you face when you move is this: what do you value, what is worth the enormous effort of packing it carefully into a box?

As the days of packing went on, we were growing exhausted. My eyes were half shut long before I fell into bed at night. We still hadn’t figured out what to do about our houseplants. They couldn’t go into a moving truck. Our things would be going into storage for a while. To get the plants moved safely, we needed another plan. My brother and his wife stepped up. They would come with their pickup and transport the plants and things too delicate for a moving van.

That solved the logistical problem, but at the back of my mind were the windows at the new house. With the house being in a grove of pines, its windows would be in shadow for much of the day. Above the screech of packing tape, tearing, I could hear the plants thinking: What are you doing?

Moving isn’t new to me. In my seven decades, I’ve lived  in twenty-nine different residences. Various rented or owned homes—of my parents’, my college housing, my first apartment, then rental houses and other apartments, and finally homes that Bruce and I have owned. Every move brought different apprehensions. There’s something unsettling about having to disturb “what is.”

And then there are the “what if’s,” what if the new life and the old life don’t mesh? When, after graduate school, I married Bruce and joined him in the small town where he was teaching, he said, “When you’re talking to people, try not to mention that you worked at Harvard before you went to graduate school.” Yes, I worked at Harvard, and you know what that suggests: hyper-intellectual, high-falutin’ to the n’th degree.

Never mind that I was support-staff, one set of fingers on typewriter keys. Never mind, in general. The people I worked with every day, whatever their titles, were just people. I stared at Bruce incredulously when he said it. Good Lord! I shouldn’t talk about Harvard?

It was the early 1990s. I mostly heeded his advice. But it seemed sad, and it still seems sad to me that, even now, considering how people have divided into philosophical and cultural camps, one period of my life could, if discovered, put someone off wanting to know me.

Working at Harvard was a gift to me. Staff members were able to take classes, and I took advantage of it. I enrolled in poetry workshops taught by accomplished poets, an eventual Nobel Laureate, even. The two years I spent there inspired me to go on to graduate school, to do more of the sifting and winnowing I’d learned in Wisconsin.

At this point, our late-life move is past tense. The boxes have been flattened and recycled.

Well, mostly. We’re looking now at a different sort of box. Life going forward seems a huge, empty box. Bruce moved here for me, and I feel the weight of it. Will we find experiences and avenues and new work to fill that empty box? What if, apart from being close to family, the box still seems empty? What if we don’t thrive in the new lives we’ve chosen? A hope for me that it won’t go that way arose in a very surprising way—and it involves one more, little Harvard story.

When I was worrying so about the houseplants as we prepared for our move, there was one in particular I fretted over. It’s the Schefflera in the picture at the top of this post, enjoying the sunny patio window at another of the houses we’ve lived in. We’ve cared for that plant for forty years. I call it the Harvard Plant.

At Harvard, my job title was assistant to a residential dean, and the office I worked in was located in one of the college Houses, a Harvard dormitory. In the spring of my first academic year there, as students were heading home for the summer, I was walking through the courtyard one day with my colleague, Edie, assistant to the House Master—what other colleges might call a Head Resident. The courtyard was a mess. Students had dumped things they didn’t want, to be disposed of by maintenance staff.

There, in the midst of it all, was the Harvard Plant. It looked thoroughly abandoned. Imagining the student shenanigans it must have witnessed, the shots of whisky it might have been treated to, I said to Edie, “I need this plant.” I’d walked to work and had no way to get it home without carrying it. Edie understood, and we hoisted it up and carried it to her car. At the end of the day, she drove while I hugged that plant home.

My Harvard Plant has crossed the country with me several times, been with me through pretty big ups-and-downs. It has survived a lot—seasons of slow or little growth, alternating with occasional enthusiastic trimming by my pruning-shears-wielding spouse. That plant has always represented a part of my life that I’m grateful for. I witnessed logical, scholarly thinking at one of our country’s most respected institutions. It shaped my life as surely as Madison did. Two places: different, equal, equally important.

We’re nearly settled in the new house now. But the question I raised earlier has still been on my mind. Besides the ability to totally reorchestrate my life in partnership with the one I love, what else is possible at this late age? Can we thrive in a new place to the degree we have before? Can my beloved Harvard Plant continue its quiet existence, too, in changed circumstances under so many trees? Will there be light enough for us?

When we took possession of the new house, I placed the Harvard Plant on its familiar table in the window of a south-facing patio door. I wasn’t sure about putting it there. But it was the best option. For part of every day, sunlight breaks through the trees and bathes the window in golden, slanting light.

The plant has responded as if we’ve delivered Heaven’s pure light. Here’s a photo, taken about a week after we moved in.

Good Lord. How had I not noticed until then all the fresh leaves sprouting brilliantly? As I write this, they’ve grown and darkened and been joined by others. They all are reaching higher, intent on filling the window, intent on drinking in the world. A world larger and more open than the circle of trees that ring this house.

There are times when I need to go back farther than Cambridge, Mass—farther even than Madison. This is one of those times. I need to follow my father’s approach to life, to step back and cut away my own intellectual crap. I’m skilled at slicing life into complicated layers. It’s the writer in me, the piece always trying to make some kind of sense.

Sometimes, you just have to trust—in an overarching order, or that you’re enough. The Harvard Plant’s new leaves seem to me both message and metaphor. To drink in the light of this world is what I hope for myself, too, through every day, and all my days. I wish it for everyone. A piece of Harvard, just a little piece now of my past, has come to the Northwoods, and it’s good. There is light.