My Pothos Plant Finally Convinced Me to Write in My Office

My current writing space evolved around a scruffy pothos plant I bought from the grocery store in early 2021. I’d been eyeing her for weeks, watching as the tiny holes on her leaves doubled in number and her price slowly dropped. “Buy plants from places that know how to take care of them,” one of my friends warned when I first mentioned my desire to make my space greener. “Home-improvement stores? Yes. Grocery stores? Maybe as a last resort.”

So I waffled, until one night, on a dessert run, I saw the plant had been marked down to $3.27. The final price. I nestled her into my basket along with a couple of slices of caramel cake and headed to the checkout.

I come from people who are good at making beautiful things, and at making things beautiful. My maternal uncle makes preserves and other confections (he can also throw down at a fish fry). His son makes lotion, soap, and shampoo. My maternal aunt has a green thumb. Her house is filled with plants spilling from their pots, crawling down armoires and china cabinets with fat, waxy leaves. “They don’t need that much,” I once heard her tell someone who complimented her on her skills. “Just light, water, and a little bit of love.” I hoped the rescue I’d saved from the compost would be similar. When I got home, I put her in the brightest spot in my apartment, not to mention the least used: the guest room/office. Its two floor-to-ceiling catty-corner windows would give her 180 degrees of sunlight. If she survived, great. If not, I only lost a couple of bucks.

Not so long ago, I was a writer who wrote anywhere but at her desk, even though I’ve had one since undergrad—a hand-carved one that’s followed me across three states and countless moves. In grad school, I wrote in bed, shoving the books to one side when it was time to sleep. As a postgrad, I wrote on the living room couch with the television on, but muted, to keep me company without distractions. In my last apartment, I often wrote on my screened patio in an oversized beanbag chair I got from another writer in exchange for contributor copies of journals and anthologies that featured my work. When it was too cold to work outside, I returned to the couch, but never to the office. So for the first few weeks, I left my pothos to fend for herself, giving her water and opening the blinds in the mornings, coming back only briefly to close them before bed.

And she thrived. Her dark, dull leaves turned a rich, glossy emerald, and the ones that had been nearly bifurcated by bugs and mishandling fell away like rotting lace. She was a tough one, a fighter, and I loved to see it. It was nice visiting her just after sunrise to raise the blinds, and when I remembered that my aunt and her daughter liked talking to their plants, I started greeting her: “Good morning, beautiful girl!” I’d chirp as I lifted her pot liner to replenish the water. I’d been warned about oversaturation, but in those first few weeks, she would empty the pot every other day, so I placed a few stickers on it to remind myself when she was getting dry: If, the day before, I’d turned the happy watermelon to face my desk, she was okay. If it was the sad egg, she needed water. Then one morning, I decided that, instead of unplugging my computer from its nightly charge station—my desk—to take it to the couch to answer emails, I’d work there for a few minutes with my pothos looking on. Like her, I also needed that early morning sunlight, or a few somber minutes to stare out into the trees. Those moments calmed me, giving me time to think about a line in a poem draft or a novel scene I couldn’t quite get right. My morning rituals of visiting the room got longer and longer, and so did my plant’s vines.

One day, while thrift shopping, I noticed a comfortable-looking office chair, and I remembered the somewhat stiff dining room chair I’d dragged into the office a few weeks before. This one was leather and reclining, with arms and a backrest. I rolled it to the register and never looked back. “Scoot over. I live here now too,” I joked late one night while moving the plant to a small table to make more room for me at my desk.

In fact, every room in that place was starting to feel crowded. With so much time indoors with Zoom meetings and book edits, I began looking around, thinking, Damn, I need more space. But in a city like Nashville, which is gentrifying at breakneck speed, space is a privilege I didn’t think I could afford. But I looked, and I ultimately found a small house a few miles from my old complex. It has more room, free parking, and huge east-facing windows—my favorite part of the house.

My plants were among the first things I moved, and I set my pothos in my office on a stand all by herself so she wouldn’t have to be shuffled around with books, notebooks, and papers. Shortly after our move, I had to repot her because she had outgrown the flimsy plastic container I brought her home in. When I shimmied the root ball free, I noticed that her roots had wrapped around the soil instead of growing through it; like me, she’d been doing her best to work everywhere except where she needed to be.

I now work almost exclusively in my office, where I have moved most of my books, my treadmill, and an exercise ball that once served as an office chair during a time when I thought sitting on it would give me better abs. (It didn’t—it just made me want to sit on the couch instead.) Over the summer, I bought a print of one of the first illustrations ever created from my poems, a piece by Sirin Thada that accompanied “and though the odds say improbable” in Catapult during the summer of 2020. In October, when I decided to take my own author photo for my forthcoming novel, Nobody’s Magic, I took it in my office, near the windows, letting the light play on my face. It’s my favorite photo of myself to date.

I feel like this is now the room where many kinds of creative magic happen. I write in here and (sometimes) I work out. I bought a corkboard, where I’ve penned affirmations like a line from Lorde’s “Yellow Flicker Beat”: “I move through town; I’m quiet, like a fight.” When I look over at my pothos, I am reminded that, like her, I am, in many ways, an underdog. I blossomed late, publishing my first book at thirty-eight, and even though the second one was just released, I still feel like I’m trying to catch up to the life I want. But admiring her today versus the night I brought her home reminds me that looks can be more than deceiving; indeed, they can often be untruthful. I would have never guessed the kind of plant this girl could be. She also reminds me that the best response to doubt of all kinds—even self-doubt—is surviving, then thriving. I see her silently flourishing, modeling tenacity every time I sit down to make something beautiful.

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