Dear Mom dead sticks don’t grow

Dear Mom dead sticks don’t grow

Claire finds sticks outside and decides to plant them in the flower garden. They are just sticks. Old dead sticks that have fallen out of trees. She sticks them in the ground, carefully gathering the earth around their base and tests them to make sure they are sturdy. Then she waters them. At first I thought this was cute. When there were half a dozen dead sticks poking out the garden I thought it best to explain how this works.

“These branches will never grow Claire. They are dead. To get a plant to grow here you have to plant the whole plant or use seeds and wait for them to grow.” She listened attentively.

“So, they wont grow”

“No,” I said.

“But I watered them.” She pointed this out as if to rebuff my notion that the sticks would not grow.

“That does not matter. Sometimes plants die and there is nothing you can do to get them to grow again.”

“Like when you pull the weeds in the flowers so they won’t grow again? They always grow again.” She now presented irrefutable evidence I was wrong.

“Weeds are different they are the undead of the plant world, like zombies and skeletons. You can’t just kill them the normal way you have to find their secret vulnerability.”

“What is the vulminability of weeds?”

“I don’t know, if I knew I would use it to rid our garden of the undead scourge.” Trying to get back on subject. “The sticks, however, are really dead. They will never grow leaves again.”

She studied the small grove of dead sticks for a bit. She thought about this information a bit then picked up the hose and continued watering the sticks.

“They are dead Claire, they are not going to grow anymore.”

“I know Daddy, I just want to water them.”

“Okay, but no more sticks in the garden okay?”

“Okay.” She busied herself with watering her undead tree garden.

As I finished mowing the lawn I looked over at what once had been a stand of dead tree limbs poking up out of the flowers. Bare branches that echoed of winter days and barren trees. They were now flush with green leaves and yellow flowers. I moved closer. She had very carefully and meticulously impaled a tree leaf on every branch of ever stick. Little leaves now adorned the branches, painstakingly applied as if a fairy had brought them back to life. She had taken dandelions and propped them in the elbow of each place that branched out. She was putting the finishing touches on one of the new trees and noted I was stopping to watch.

“They needed some help Daddy, I fixed it.”

“Yes you did darling, it looks lovely. “

Love Mike