Oh, Talking to Strangers, it’s been a good long while. Just over eleven months since I’ve posted anything on this blog. There are so many directions in which I could point a finger, but the truth is, this is not the time or place for finger-pointing. Since March, time and again I’ve sat in front of a blinking cursor – typing and erasing – struggling to wrestle my thoughts into sentences, my anxieties into paragraphs, my fears into phrases, to no avail. Everything I wrote felt stilted. Trite. Crappy. “No one wants to read this drivel,” I would tell myself.  Don’t try to convince me otherwise, because I’m certain that the nasty voice inside my head was right. I didn’t even want to read it.

Never in my life have I experienced the kind of crippling writer’s block that froze my fingers and brain cells in the spring and summer.  I felt like I was drawing from an empty well. Perhaps I was. The fear, anxiety, and uncertainty of the past five months are still very much a reality for me. My dark and stormy, cold and prickly, bent and broken bits are still rattling around in my head and heart, threatening to bring back the block, but most days, the light drowns out the dark.

Today, as I loaded Flann into my car to take her to the dog park, I was struck by the urge to write. I couldn’t disappoint my dog, so I threw her ball approximately one million times and then drove home to open my computer. When lightning strikes after a year-long drought, you put out a bucket to collect the rainwater. It’s not filtered. It’s a little gritty. But it will quench your thirst.

Lordy, there were a whole bunch of mixed metaphors in that introduction. Are you ready for a pivot? Here goes.  On the eve of my 36^th birthday, I wrote a piece about a plant clipping I got from a bar manager when I was out with friends. If you plan to keep reading, I might suggest you take a field trip to that post first. If you’re not up for reading two of my posts in a single sitting (I’m not offended), I’ll provide a bit of context.

Long story short, I was out at a bar and remarked on the greenery covering the walls. The bar manager brought me a tiny clipping and told me to put it in a pot with some soil and water it. I carried it home in a plastic cup, let it sit on my counter for a week, and planted it the day before I turned 36.  I put the pot, with its three tiny leaves, on my western facing windowsill, and every few days, as per instructions, I watered it.  Soon, one leaf grew into another, and my little clipping turned into a vine that began to snake in between my blinds and curl between the letters of the light up “LOVE” sign it shares space with on my sill.

At first, I would count the leaves every few weeks. I knew there were only three fragile leaves when I planted it, and so it was fun to measure its growth (and, let’s face it, my success) by taking note of each successive sprout. I would get a little thrill each time a tightly wrapped leaf would erupt and unfurl and as the number climbed into the double digits, I patted myself on the back. I had kept this plant alive. It was thriving, and I looked at it as a rudimentary calendar – like living hash marks on a wall (or a window) marking the progression of my own days, weeks, and months. 

Occasionally, I would have to detangle the vine from my blinds. In its relentless pursuit of sunlight, it seemed my plant was determined to strangle itself, pushing so violently against the heavy paned glass that it began to stunt its own growth. Freed from its own ambition, the vine flourished and leaves that had been tightly bound relaxed open, taking new twists before turning back toward the window. 

Over the past year and a half, this plant has fascinated me. When I first planted it, I imagined that it would grow in many directions – that each of the three original leaves would sprout into tendrils of green and cream and tumble out of the tiny pot, spilling over the edge of my windowsill. But that is not how it grew. It is one single vine growing out of a tiny pot. At its root, it is thin and fragile, but as it matured, the vine became thicker and the leaves more robust. It is so heavy that if I were to let it drop to the ground, the sheer weight of it would pull the entire pot down or – worse yet – the plant would entirely uproot itself.  The vine is so thick I would have trouble cutting a clipping to share or repot, and I’ve wondered about its ongoing care. Does it need a bigger pot? If you read the post I linked at the top, you know my repotting success if 0 for 1, and I don’t want to make it 0 for 2. My heart can’t take a plant death right now.

About a week ago I pulled up on my tiptoes to see if my plants needed water (that’s right, I said plants – plural. I have a fantastically thriving basil plant if anyone wants to make pesto. You have to share.)   As I peered over the top of my vine’s pot – I gasped. Not because the soil was dry (it was), but because out of the parched soil, splitting from the root of my vine, were two tiny, new green leaves. I started crying. Yes – that’s the truth. My plant made me cry.

You see, that vine has become something of a living, growing metaphor for me – for my life. I planted it not knowing if it would flourish and what shape it might take and when it did. I had my own ideas of what I thought it would look like or should look like, but in the end, there were only a few things I could control. I could squirt Miracle-Gro on the soil, water it occasionally, and save it from its own self-sabotage against the windowpane – but my plant found its own path, pushing blindly into the unknown.

From its first days as a clipping off a barroom wall, I internalized the messaging of my plant. I also loved it, cared for it, and rooted for it. It grew big and strong and beautiful – but it only grew in one direction. And I cheered it on. How many times are each and every one of us like my vine – pushing blindly in one direction so sure that what we want and the direction we are going is the right way even when we are strangling ourselves in the blinds or breaking our necks on thick glass?

I started crying when I saw those new leaves because they are the same plant.

My year-and-a-half-year-old vine is starting over. It’s growing in a new direction. It is growing in two directions.  The events of the last five months have uprooted us, derailed us, strangled, and sabotaged us on personal, local, national, and global levels. While a part of us will keep growing in the direction we were headed – we all have to start over in one way or another.  We can and we will start over. We will be both the people we were and the people we will become in spite of and, more importantly, because of the challenges we face now and in the coming months. We may feel fragile and uncertain, but if my barroom vine is any indication, there is hope for us all.

Until next time…