A Small Story for Shelley and Her Collection of Everyday Miracles

I wrote this for a friend of mine who, despite pretty hard life circumstances, was very skilled at finding joy in everyday places. This is something I figure we can all use some help with.

When my husband Martin moved into his current office, he inherited some plants from the previous occupant. When you look at these plants, you instantly realize two things: 1) why they are in an office and not living happily and well-tended on the windowsill of someone’s sunny kitchen, and 2) why their former owner, who had moved just down the hall, left them behind. They are prototypical “office plants”; they have apathy written all over them. Their leaves are dark and listless, and their pots stained and functional. They embody the quiet, stoic tolerance of inadequate living conditions that every person who has ever spent more than one afternoon sitting in a cubicle understands. They are the kind of plants that, if you glanced over at them in the middle of a long, dull afternoon, they would sigh and say, “Yeah, you don’t always get what you want, but what can you do?”

Martin, however, is blessed with a happy combination of incongruous abilities: he can both appreciate the pleasure in the small and humble details of life, and also remain oblivious to things that are aesthetically displeasing. He didn’t get rid of the plants. He just accepted them with a basic tolerance for other living creatures sharing his office space. He watered them and left them alone. He didn’t trim them when long, straggly shoots started to form on one of the plants; he didn’t pay attention when the leaves of this plant started to turn a glossy green tinged with pink, and wind around one of the picture frames. He didn’t really notice the tiny, firm buds forming on the bare offshoots that kept growing up around the window.

And then one day, he did notice that the buds were becoming longer. A day or two later, strange and beautiful flowers began to appear. Each bud unfurled into what looked like a tiny, upside-down umbrella of waxy pink flowers. Each little umbrella had eight or ten perfectly formed blooms of firm, light pink petals with dark pink centers. They were flowers so startling in their uniqueness, and their incongruity to the rest of the plant, all you could was stand there and stare at them.

This went on for days—each day a new bunch of tiny symmetrical clusters opened. It is still going on now, with the flowers becoming fuller, more robust, and exuding a heavy, musky scent. Martin showed them to the former occupant of the office, who said that he had had those plants for more than fifteen years and that they had never done anything like that before.

So what do you do when the miracle of unimagined potential unfolds right in front of you? I guess you slip it quietly into your soul, hoping some of it will rub off on you. You hope that your own bumbling attempts at perfection aren’t keeping your life from unfolding into something as beautiful, something whose outline lives just beyond your vision. And you hope that if you are patient and lucky, and pay close attention, maybe someday you’ll be able to see it again.