jacktellslies

I've finally met one of my neighbours, a girl of perhaps sixteen.

"What is that? Is that mistletoe?" she asked as I locked my door behind me.

Looking up at the rather large sprig I'd tied to my lamp, I told her, "No, it's boxwood."

"What's that?"

"It's a hedge. It's... another kind of plant."

"Oh. Not mistletoe?"

"Oh! Well, no, but if anyone cares to use it as such, then by all means."

"Good, because I have been all week."

"Ha! Excellent! Fabulous. Cheers." And with that, I was off.

Children have been kissing on my front steps! I'm most pleased.

I'm more than a little bit infatuated with aloe plants. As a child, learning to heal small burns with a plant helped a good deal when the savages and the gypsies never bothered to kidnap me and teach me their ways.

The aloe plant that lives with me just now is one that I found in the trash. It was brown and sick and on top of a chair that I was taking, and in a perfectly reasonable pot, so I planned to carry the whole lot home and discard of the dead thing there. I watered it once, just in case, and the whole thing sprung back to life. We've been friends since. It is a whole mess of separate little plants, it seems. It's all very bushy and spindly and a pale, glowing green.

Last night I was at my mum's house for our Saint Patrick's day traditions, the slaughtering of the pig and the ruining of the Irish coffee and what have you. I was investigating her plants, as this time of year I'm able to think of little else besides green things, and I found the most magnificent aloe I'd ever seen. It seemed to be all one big, thick stalk, and maybe four others, each increasingly smaller and slowly circling inwards, like a partially opened fan. It was a deep, growling green. It was almost prehistoric. And, I was informed, it was my plant, Seamus! I got it when I first went away to college, but my roommate pummeled it so often with the curtains that I feared for its life. It used to be a tiny thing. I'm so proud. When I have more windows, one day, I'll steal him away.