My Little Office Apple-Trees

Let me start off by saying that my work schedule is somewhat sporadic.  Because of school, which I attend all day Tuesday’s and Thursday’s, I had to scale down to part time at work.  Now I work remotely on Wednesday’s and in the office on Friday’s.

 So a while back, when I was making the two hour commute to work each day, it finally began to sink in that I had been there almost a year and my work-space [it's not a cubical, it's not a cubical, it's not a ... okay it is a cubical] was quite devoid of anything personal.  Each morning I would walk to my desk (always the first or second to arrive due to the long commute and my theory that it’s better to be absurdly early than late), and look into the lives of my co-workers via the picture-collages, plaques, trinkets, decorations, and so forth that seemed to multiply in an endless desire to occupy all empty desk space.  Then I would reach my desk.  Not much but few stacks of paper cluttered with sticky-notes.  Hmm…no wonder I felt they didn’t think I belonged.  So, in a somewhat defiant manner (or so I told myself because I would not go the picture route), I bought a plant.

I found this plant in a tourist town up the coast – Solvang if you really care to know – in a little store catering to mother’s like mine.  I had let word slip of my plant-search and she (the absolutely wonderful, amazing, supportive, best-friend-of-a-mother she is) found one.  Over priced for sure, this was a delicate ivy of some sort that made its way up a four-leg wire guide that came to a point, about a foot and a half above the pot.  A beauty for sure, not that I had much hope of keeping it alive.

 Live it did, however, under the flickering, fluorescent light above my desk.  How? I have no idea, but sure enough new, tiny, brilliant green leaves started to appear and reach their way up in the air.  To me it was perfect and to the best of my knowledge, it declared that yes, this was some one’s desk, and no, there was no way to know the details of this person’s life just by passing their desk in the morning.

That was until my schedule changed, school began and this ‘part-time’ business started.  At first, during the hectic time of becoming one of the company’s first remote – or work-from-home - employee’s, I had yet to request that Friday be an in-office day.  I didn’t see the office for a three month stretch and when I returned, you guessed it, the plant was a crisp skeleton of what it one was.  This was not a case of withering and dying or simply a, leaves falling off the steam, issue.  No, my plant was a completely preserved version of its former self, down to the tiniest new foliage.  Damn.  Couldn’t someone have thrown a cup of water into the pot for you?  No, of course not, they didn’t have the trinkets and picture collages to bring you to the forefront of whatever they were thinking as they passed your desk. 

So on Friday’s when I make it into the office I look at the bones of my plant, and wonder at their stuborn defiance in holding on to each fragile leaf.  I do my best to water it – I guess this points at some belief that there is a core in those thin stalks which has not died out completely and which will reemerge in a glorious green statement of triumph. 

Nope.  Nothing.  Months have gone by and there was not the slightest sign of life.  Until the apple, or apples I should say, that is.  I was occupying my lunch in front of the computer one day, eating a Granny-Smith (my favorite, although they’re the only apples I eat so it’s not much of a contest).  When I got to the core – I eat the core, don’t ask me why – I saw that one of the tiny seeds had started to root. 

…I didn’t think this was possible:  as children we had a nanny from Romania.  She would bring back chicken or duck eggs – can’t remember which – on the plane with her and try to hatch them at our house.  It never worked.  Something to due with the metal scanner ‘rays’ you walk through.  I just applied the same logic to why, whenever I tried to plant a seed from something grocery-store bought, it never worked…

On an impulse I put the seeds into the pot of my skeleton plant.  Yesterday at work I looked over and sure enough there were about three, one inch apple trees growing. Green again.  It was nice.