Moving the plants back...

28 March 2021: About a year ago, I moved my office plants home. Even before COVID, I would worry about leaving them un-watered too long if I was away from campus. But last year, not knowing if Knutti would eventually get fully locked down or if I would get sick and be unable to water them, it just released some anxiety to bring them home. Yet it was quietly devastating to bring them home, an acknowledgement of how bad things were, how bad they could get, and how uncertain we were about when Shepherd would look and feel like Shepherd again.

Even then, I wondered what it would take for me to bring them back. To bring them back to campus only to have to bring them home again if things got worse? I couldn't even think about it. So they stayed at my house through the entire summer and fall semester and two-thirds of this semester. Eventually, "bringing the plants back" became this hazy item on my post-vaccine list. 

Today I brought the two biggest ones back. It's no easy feat: they are both pretty large and I carried them in my plastic laundry basket. (Forgot to snap pictures, but maybe I'll add them to this post tomorrow.) There is still one more here at home, but I want to repot some of it and fix it up a bit. And in the weeks before we realized how bad COVID would be, I had even purchased a couple of bright pots to put in the hallway window. That never happened, but I still have the pots, so maybe that is the next step.

Tiny steps towards normal...