In Which I Am Incapable of Not Killing Plants

We spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to fit the 21 people coming to our seder in the dining room, but we soon gave up and went for the long table from one end of the dining room through the double door to the other end of the living room. We used the dining room table with both leaves, three card tables, four kitchen chairs, eight dining room chairs, nine borrowed folding chairs, and four white tablecloths. Also eight blue everyday plates, eight plates from my grandmother's china (white with violets and gold gilt, partly worn off), five bright-colored plastic plates, all our matching silver (stainless, that is) and the motley assortment of forks, knives and spoons from before we got married (and matching), now stored in a shoebox on the top shelf for just such occasons.

Then I decided the table needed flowers. Specifically, little pots of not-very-tall spring flowers, at intervals down the middle. The perfect task for my dad and T, who dutifully went off and came back with half a dozen little green pots of yellow and white primrose-type things. Very pretty, exactly what I'd envisioned, and I spaced them down the middle of the table and they were lovely.

The next day we broke down the table, finished washing the dishes, and took the tablecloths to be laundered. I watered the pretty flowers and put two of the little pots on the kitchen table and the rest on the dining room windowsill. By the next day, the leaves were going yellow and the flowers were shriveling. I watered. I watered more. I didn't water. I pulled off yellow leaves and shriveled flowers. Whatever I did didn't seem to matter, they just got worse.

But you know, I have a job and two kids and taxes and bills and a house that needs to be cleaned every time I turn around and friends I haven't called in weeks and projects piling up, and I'm very sorry, but TRYING TO KEEP THESE DAMN PLANTS ALIVE IS THE LAST STRAW.

I'm letting them die. And I bought some lovely flowers at the market yesterday and they are in a vase on the dining room table. And when they die I will throw them out. And I told my dad I did not want the rubber plant he and my mother bought in 1959, because while I refuse to feel guilty for killing innocent little baby primroses, I cannot take responsibility for the fate of a nearly-fifty-year-old rubber plant. I am what I am. I accept myself. I am a killer of plants.