Papa’s Greenhouse

In the evenings after hospital rounds, or Sundays after church, when ice blanketed his garden during those frigid midwestern winters, my father would retreat into the greenhouse to tend his plants.

Some resided there year-round with thickly sprouting triangular leaves, exotic jungle names: aloe vera, mangave, purple queen spiderwort, or small nubby cactuses attracting curious children’s fingertips,

densely packed in pots layered on slats of wood, below garish scarlet geraniums or creeping jenny cascading from hanging planters. But most were sojourners wintering over the season, like tomato plants

whose little red beads he plucked and savored while he set about kneading seeds into their trays, transferring seedlings into terracotta pots with iron hand trowels, or later shelling beans into glass bowls,

or stripping dry, dead stalks of herbs with gloved hands, crushing their flakes with his stone mortar and pestle, which he blended into ointments or sifted into tea bags to treat his patients’ chronic ailments: arthritis, insomnia.

Children always needed a job: mine was “stand here and hold this watering can.” Later I played at his feet, sitting cross-legged to collect stones on the ground where water dripped, strewn with rubber hoses

like limp, dead snakes, listening to the florid arpeggios of canaries and cockatiels in their suspended cages,

the cat pawing at the screen door. My small knuckles mimicked his giant’s thumb, caked with black soil

at the nail’s edge, as it pressed down seeds into slots of plastic trays. When sweat dripped from his black bushy hair already peppered with grey, he would finally rest in the gathering dark, flushed in his undershirt

amidst the humidity and birdsong, my small body straddling his damp knee, to admire the dense jungle birthed by his hands, exclaiming the same single word to sum up his wet bliss, his green plant joy:

“Glorious!”

Illustration by Kseniia Vakhrusheva