To the editor:
As I read in the Ricker Rumblings column of the Christmas cactus blooming, for a fleeting moment I pictured another cactus, a large prickly plant that came to our family very tiny when Leonard and I were at Fair Street grade school, Ina let us each pick a plant from a counter down back in Newberry’s (J.J., the five-and-ten). Leonard picked a cactus, which someone said was a Christmas cactus, but Ina found out it was a Crown of Thorns; mine was a Jade plant.
I suspect the latter’s untimely death was due to over watering, as they require very little. The cactus lived on — and on — in a bigger and bigger pot in the farthest-back window in the studio. Very big and south-facing, with all that glass, it let the sun keep a cactus from the West quite happily covered with little red flowers. Year after year, Ina staked and tied the plant, and tied some more, as it grew all over the window and headed beyond.
Leonard went to college, served in the Marines, finished graduate school and became a professor, then head of the university’s nuclear physics department. Oh, yes, along the way he married and, with his wife’s help, had two kids, who eventually went to college, became officers in the Navy, and married. During all that time, he returned to Houlton to visit. Each time he would admire the cactus and Ina might mention that it was his.
After Ina died, when we were clearing out the studio, we stood surveying the cactus in the window. What to do with it? “I have to take it with me,” he said. “She reminded me many times of how it came to be mine.” And he did take it. It was the only passenger in his car on that trip back west.
Byrna Porter Weir
Rochester, N.Y.
