Cultivating a Friendship

The beauty of caring for indoor plants is that you are privy to lusious greenery or perhaps brilliant flowers at any time of the year. Although I do revel in seasonality and try not to choose fruits and vegetables long since past their prime harvesting time, my inability to tend to a real garden prevents me from growing anything outside the walls of my house. There’s no point in bemoaning the invariable fate of my outdoor plants however, so instead I try to enjoy maintaining more summery plant as the weather grows increasely friged just beyond the thin glass panes of our windows.

Careful to preserve my mementos of a warmer season, each pot bearing the fragile blooms is scheduled to receive nourishment regularly, every other day. Diligently preparing to complete this task mid-afternoon, I filled a pitcher with tap water with which to feed everything from the newborn sprouts to the sturdy roots 0f my collective plants. Overburdened by the copious amount of liquid, reaching almost to the very top of its container, I struggled to bring it into the next room without splashing water all over the furniture. Eager to lighten the load, I hastily dumped some in each pot as I made my way down the line, when something peculiar caught my eye. Thank goodness it wasn’t a second later that I noticed there was something unusual taking shelter under this one flower, because one false move and the resident would have found themselves completely soaked!

A quick glance may yeild nothing out of the ordinary here, but looking deeper there is unarguably a tiny teddy bear enjoying the shade of this flower! Green like the vivacious foliage surrounding him, I’m even tempted to believe that this fellow did indeed grow here where I found him that day. Why else would he be so comfortably situated in the most peculiar location, and more importantly, how else did he get here?

Luckily, he understood the difficulty I was having with my heavy jug of water, and quickly vacated the area so that I could provide his guarded flower with food. Taking care to keep the leaves as dry as possible for him, I quickly concluded that it didn’t matter where exactly he came from since he had never bothered me or my leafy assemblage before. With all the hospitality I could muster, I invited him to stay in his cozy green bed for as long as he’d like. It will be a long winter after all; There’s a reason why these things won’t grown outside anymore!

Besides, you can never have too many friends close by, right?