The House Plant and the Kitchen Window

Awake Unquiet Heart

The House Plant and the Kitchen Window

by Katherine Brauer

There’s a dying plant in the kitchen window. We always keep the window open, as a strategically placed black hole at nighttime and an alarm clock shining into my bedroom doorway in the morning. There’s a pile of dishes in the sink, but it’s a different one from yesterday morning, and clean pans and one dirty pot on the stove. There’s a beige-ness to the room, not in actual color but in feeling. Not completely white, like a canvas that can be made into anything, but something a little grimmer, grimier, that you can’t quite clean out.

I have spent a lot of time in that kitchen feeling sorry for myself this year. And hearing terrible and depressing things that make me want to jump right into that black hole. Bust past the green/brown leaves falling onto the hardwood floor, plunge into the unknown nothingness. There is such an unrelenting exhaustion that goes into this bullshit. There’s no simple way to talk about it, to allude to the elitism that is whiteness and the patriarchy and the rest of these debasing power structures that are running the world into the ground. Pushing us closerand closer to that black hole.

We named that dying plant Natalie, for no other reason than we thought it fit. Natalie had long, heavy vines with healthy leaves when we first got her. Her leaves are still there, but the vines died and we had to trim them. She needs more light than we can give her. But she is decorative, so we do the best we can with her next to the black hole.

Natalie doesn’t really support life, though she makes mine a littlebetter. But if she did, maybe we’d rethink her placement. We could stickher out on the porch or bring her to the coffee shop raising half a dozen plants of their own. But that is not the way the world is working, and not really how we are either.

You know those pictures of the Earth from the 1970s? And the ones from today, where it is significantly browner? That’s kind of like Natalie. But Natalie is a house plant, not the living, breathing, breath-providing organism we set our feet on.

Natalie also doesn’t have any set, centuries-old institutions that are killing her, only a college kid trying her best. But how can that college kid focus on helping Natalie when everything else is going to shit? When 9/10 of her friends are continuously dealing with the violence and entitlement of men who took away the life they wanted? When she’s had a friend drop out of school every year of college? When she has gotten off scot free and everyone she cares about is pushing through something completely unimaginable to her? How do you decide what to put your energy towards when the world is in such adark place, in every way possible? So many diabolical institutions and so much moneysupporting their perseverance. Like Pando, a giant collection of trees that share rootsand thrive as one because they hold each other up.

Maybe… it isn’t such a bad thing if the world ends, if this massive change in climate from colonialism and the patriarchy really does take us all down. But that’s too easy on the oppressors, the men who use fear and money to get what they want and stop the rest of us from saving Natalie.

I stand in my kitchen with the black hole behind me and watch a video of an entire baseball stadium yell “Lock him up!” at the president. That empty gut feeling still lingers, but the light from my phone, and the music of people who believe in the better world loosen the tug.

There’s so much peace in trees; I think I regret that earlier metaphor. I think trees are too strong, too resilient. These illusionist structures that dehumanize those poking through the chinks in the armor are merely reacting to being caught.

I’ve never seen Pando, but I’d really like to. I’d like to be surrounded by something that old, and whole, and familial. I’m so afraid of the future, because those feelings of comfort in what is known are so fragile.

Breathe in fresh air two three four…close your eyes and listen to the tidal wave of leaves crazing each other in the breeze six seven eight…go back to your kitchen, make dinner…close the blinds and only open them for the morning light.