Variegated Leaves

On plants, grief, and memory

Me & my daughter, 2019

My grandmother died the year I was married. On my thirtieth birthday, she had a stroke and became bedridden in her home. Thirteen days later, on my mother’s birthday, she passed. Inside those two weeks, her little house came alive again.

Pots clanging and screen doors slamming. Casseroles, coffee, and baked goods. Dogs. Children. Laughter. Growing up, we had gathered here like clockwork for Sunday dinner. Roast beef or turkey. Mashed potatoes. The rolls were always made from scratch. She and my great-grandmother would do their old dance, driving everyone else from the kitchen wearing aprons and waving wooden spoons. They hardly ever spoke to each other. One of them was mostly deaf. All of the kids playing games in the backyard under an enormous oak tree. The men gathering around the television. The dog stealing and defending soiled napkins.

Twenty years later, and we hadn’t skipped a beat. Same furniture. Mostly the same faces. And the same kinds of jokes. This was a place of love. My mom was still a few years away from retirement when grandma passed. The office she worked in had given our family a living plant arrangement for the funeral. It was a hoya with speckled leaves. I remember that. My soon to be mother-in-law somehow ended up taking it home and repotting it. After we were married, she gave it to us.

We spent the next decade renting a small bungalow just north of Washington, DC. The plant lived on a tall windowed cabinet I purchased from an auction. It contained cookware and liquor bottles. Over it was our wedding portrait. I arranged the long spindly vines around that picture of us. We had a dog who went from middle to old age in that house then died. Another who didn’t survive a year. We lost several babies there. Then we had a little girl. The marriage didn’t last long after that. The plant was there. It was watered. I may have wiped its leaves down once. I can’t remember. When we split, the plant came with me.

I put it high on a shelf in my bedroom. I talked to it. Thirteen years after my grandmother’s funeral, it bloomed. The flowers smelled like velvety chocolate.

Bedroom shelf, 2023

Now it blooms every year. The vines continue to reach. But the roots have found their limit. And somehow through all the laughter and tears, of dinners cooked, visitors come and gone, and a thousand and one micro dramas. This plant. This witness. This companion. Should take me back to my grandmother’s kitchen.

She didn’t even have plants.

This essay originally appeared in the 2026 Worm Moon Issue of my newsletter the Liminal.