The plants are multiplying. They need new pots which I don’t have so I find old ones and streak them with violet and gold. Brushes dry in the dishrack alongside the pizza cutter, the wooden spoons. Potting soil and paint collect in the veins of the floorboards.
Another flea-market dining table has joined our family of orphans and strays. On any given day, half the furniture is hidden under cover of old newsprint.
An explosion of of foliage in the quasi foyer threatens to displace the coats. It needs a haircut, a transplant, a new home, yet most of the walls here are too far from windows. The greenery plays musical shelves. If any one refrains from curling into brown husks, it quits the rotation and settles into its new role animating shadow. The prima donnas demanding full sun have to contend with Bug’s beads and colored pencils to stake out a spot near the sliding glass door.
Tonight, I will divide two into four and ferry several to the office on an inverted vacation. They will sip northern light from their perch on a woven throw draped over a low bookcase. Like the others, they will spill from their pots and climb the walls, feeling their way across the muted canvas. In the after hours of a 5th-floor shush, they’ll peel open and twine into inevitability.
Back home, the false starts of an amateur’s attempts at design clutter the walls and halls. At some point six or eight months in, I abandoned pretense and pushed the sofa to a nook along with the coffee table and lamps. The honey-drunk bamboo is clear for landing. At last, nothing is the everything. A person can puddle unobstructed all the way to the outermost window and maybe beyond. My son zooms his scooter in giant orbits around a living room which is every room.
From the corners, a fecund unfurling. We’ve shed the illusion of indoors. Tiny spiders loop from strands that dust the ceiling. My Mister and I lay in the bed and watch the epic journey of one who circles back on itself, forever beginning all over again. Its progress is like our own: A lovely conceit. A reason, anyway, to keep moving.
I sweep aside obstructions, machines and footstools, bigness, permanence. I own almost nothing I can’t lift on my own, nothing I can’t throw off the balcony when the time comes. In the space where things usually reside, now an invitation. A frame without a door. No lock, no knock, no fumbling for an excuse. I stretch my arms and almost brush the overgrown fronds of the philodendron. It was the first one, the one my Mister brought to welcome me home. No surprise that it’s the biggest. It has outgrown its pot. (“Out,” groans its spot.) The jade blades arch then bow like a suitor toward a patch of grass that springs from the opposite corner.
As them, us.
We expand to fill the space we inhabit. If we are wise, we clear the way for what we can’t stop anyway.
If we are ready, we live as if we’ve chosen what creeps in.
Shannon E. Williams 