Wherever I’ve lived, a geranium in a pot welcomes me home
By Deborah Salomon
One geranium, pink or red, in a clay pot.
Wherever I have lived, for more than fifty years, this has stood near the front door — a symbol, but of what? Geraniums in pots or window boxes remind me of photos and paintings of the French countryside I long to visit. The look is simple, elemental, classic, right.
When giving directions, I’d say, “The house with the geranium on the stoop.” This worked since neighbors chose pre-planted urns or hanging baskets.
My geranium owns a backstory.
The first I positioned by the door of an ugly house on an even uglier street where for fifteen summers I kept my eyes on the pot when walking up the front steps, to soften the blow. Those geraniums were always red, never salmon. My mother preferred concrete urns overflowing with salmon-colored geraniums; my dislike for the color was complicated, mirroring our relationship.
Several moves later found me in an adorable cottage, in a small but perfect Vermont city overlooking mountains and lake. The front stoop barely had room for the pot, but we managed.
Geraniums are annuals; they don’t overwinter indoors. In September I would bid farewell to the bloomed-out plant, dump the soil, wash the pot and, come spring, start anew.
I can’t remember why I brought this one inside, sometime in the early 1990s. My cottage was built against a hill, which allowed an above-ground basement. A previous owner had made the basement into a studio apartment with kitchen area and bathroom — convenient when the kids and their friends visited, otherwise unused.
The apartment door opened onto a wooded backyard. Beside the door was a covered area where I kept lawn furniture and planters. Except something about this clay pot with its spent stem made me set it on a basement windowsill.
I closed the café curtains — and forgot.
Those years are still a blur. My daughter, Wendy, died in 1991, changing everything; sunlight looked different, food had no taste, I couldn’t bear music, especially the folk songs she played on her guitar. I craved invisibility. Except I had an exhausting (and visible) job as features/food reporter at a good newspaper. Work must continue.
Winters are long in Vermont — long, cold and dark. Snow covers the ground from Thanksgiving until late March. That first winter without her was especially cold and snowy, which reminded me how much Wendy loved fresh powder. An accomplished ski racer, at 14 she trained with the Canadian National Junior Ski Team at their summer camp, in Argentina.
By April the sun was higher, stronger, illuminating winter dirt. I lugged the mop and vacuum to the basement, pulled aside the café curtains to open the window and let in fresh air.
There, on the sill, shrouded with dust, stood the forgotten clay pot. Miracle of miracles, from the withered stem erupted a green shoot, with two tiny leaves. From bone-dry soil a germ of life, sensing spring, had burst forth.
Neglected, against all odds . . . survival.
“It happens, sometimes,” a gardener friend told me.
My feelings were intense. I wanted to document the experience. The short column — barely 400 words — was the first in a weekly series on life’s vagaries that ran for more than a decade.
I have endured other losses and moved three times since that spring. In the Sandhills, with sun, heat and rain aplenty, geraniums grow into bushes. This year, mine — purchased at the farmers’ market — is a stunning purplish-pink, quite an Impressionist image with Lucky, my velvet-black cat, lying beside it.
This desire for a solo geranium in a basic clay pot remains strong. Was the tiny green shoot a sign that life survives circumstance? That a single flower can mitigate ugliness? I’m not a believer in mysteries or miracles. But I do know this: When I drive up and see that bloom, no matter locale or climate, house or apartment, I’m home. PS
Deborah Salomon is a staff writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.
