Well here she is. The smallest clipping salvaged from a barely bigger clipping from a significantly bigger (but still relatively small) begonia I had with me at home in Virginia.
I've been reading about methods of nursing clippings like this one. Since there isn't a root base to speak of I'll need to be especially conscious in these early weeks of keeping her hydrated. I'm hoping that the paper towel will act as a kind of swaddling clothes/ net for the root hairs to cling to when they start to develop! It's pretty freaking adorable to see a baby baby plant like this one just sittin' on the window sill in a baby baby jar doin' its baby baby growing thing.
Winter is still raging on (late March! ugh!) but the sunlight sure is starting to feel warmer. I think I'm getting sick again because my body probably thinks this cold front is actually the start of next autumn and also because I'm just not wearing socks anymore. It's my own private rebellion until spring is really I mean really actually here.
Wish me luck! Helpful hints from all you blogging green thumbs out there are much appreciated. :)
My mother's father's father was a cooky old son of a gun who, upon writing this now, I realize I don't really know much about aside from a single anecdote my mother told me once and abstractly refers to just about every spring when cracks in sidewalks get their flowers before anyone else does. Story goes, there was an old jump rope song, if "song" is the thing you want to call it:
Walter, Walter Wildflower, growing up so high. As we are all young ladies and very sure to die. Excepting Lizzie Wehner who is the finest flower. Hide, hide, hide for shame, turn your back and tell your beau's name.
I don't know the rules of jump rope diddies so I can't say it doesn't make any sense or anything but it sure doesn't rhyme or satisfy my rhythmic structural wants, but well there you are. You may or may not (but probably do not) remember it from that middle school syllabus novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, the story context of which is not important here just yet. Not yet.
So, my mother's father's father, raising his bright-eyed immigrant family in New York City in the tumultuous middle decades of the twentieth century, would have known this book. He would have maybe even read it, and even if he hadn't he would have known it, the way you know something first because it is familiar to you and second because it's a coincidence. Like, he lived those years, he felt those golden breezy Brooklyn summers. I don't know just how he came to adopt the song as his own but he did, and would sing it to my mom when she was a girl, in what she claims was a very, very low and slow voice, thickly accented and not unlike a whale.
Of course, in dramatic retellings, the song as sung by my mother's father's father is just the first couple of lines and is as drawn out as a humid afternoon, weird and warbly like nonsense sleeptalk, and charmingly impedimented. Imagine that sweet old dog Willoughby, from Looney Tunes, but as a 6'4" balding big guy named John.
"Waallllltterr Waaaaaaalllllllllterrrrrrr Wiiiiiiilllddddflooowwwwerrrrrrrrrr....." presumably he'd moan. Yep, a tree did grow in Brooklyn. A family tree. See what I did there? Huh? Uh huh?
I'm starting this blog today because I've just recently moved to Brooklyn from Virginia, where I was born in a tangle of kudzu and rosemary. I am a little southern bud in the big ol' city. I don't know how long I'll be here for or what exactly I'm aiming to do, as I'm excited, maybe even distracted, by so so so sooo many things. (We'll explore my existential neurosis very soon.)
I am, though, bound and determined to grow a begonia. I had one, a good one, but couldn't bring the whole gosh dang thing with me up north because it wouldn't fit in the truck and because I guess I thought it would fair better at home. I cut a piece and planted it, I'm nursing it now, and I want with all my might that it will grow. As long as I'm ramblin' on and gettin' personal, I should say I hope to grow too, you know? I hope to learn more about my wacky folklore family history and my ties to simpler Brooklyn seasons I never knew. I'm twenty-three years old and still feeling for my roots— thought I should probably start a blog about it or somethin'.
Pictures of the actual begonia soon to come. Blatherings on of begonia metaphor aplenty. All my love,
