I realize with a certain horror I’ve never been able to keep anything alive. Sure, my cat is alive, but he takes care of himself and did not come to me as a kitten. I adopted him after he had survived a number of years on the streets.

I grew up Jewish, and every year at Hebrew school, we would try our hardest to grow plants from seed for the holiday Tu B’Shevat. During Tu B’Shevat you are supposed to appreciate the environment and nature. In Israel it celebrates the renewal of the fruit crop. However, there was no appreciating done on my end as a kid.

Our school teachers would hand out plastic cups filled with dirt, and it was our job to plant the seed. I made the “take home a seed” activity a contest seeing how many seeds I could stuff into my one cup while being the first one done. I thought this made me infinitely better than the slower and more careful kids who took their time picking out the seeds, crafting the hole, making perfect dirt walls to line the seed, thinking about the placement of the seed, and only then putting the seed in. My brother was this person. Seeing how careful he was threw me into fits of rage. It was even more disappointing a couple of weeks later when my brother’s plastic cup started to sprout a seedling and my cup sat on the counter filled with sopping wet dirt.

This is not the only example of my brown thumb. As a teenager I worked in a plant nursery and occasionally we would get free plants to take home as a perk. I managed to kill every houseplant I owned. My poor care was not merely letting the plants die--it was committing involuntary plantslaughter by overwatering, underwatering, feeding too much nitrate, or not enough nitrate. However, this was my secret and I just kept taking plants.

Now at age 25 I found myself planting seeds again. I was nervous and unsure because after 20 years I'm still trying to learn the practice of being patient, reliable, and responsible. I have flashbacks of my fits of rage as a kid watching my brother’s seedling come through the soil only to throw my cup of dirt away hoping my mom wouldn’t notice. Sean and I planted seeds a couple of weeks ago. He patiently showed me how to make a hole with your finger, how to properly space, how to plant with patience and a knowledge that I found so infuriatingly slow as a kid. To ensure that the seeds germinated, I had to hand water them every day for a week. At first I was resentful of this task, hating the plants for bothering me during Glee. Then something changed. I began to enjoy working in the garden even without Sean there. It wasn’t long before I found myself talking to my seeds - What was wrong with me? It was as though I had become farmer Lowell overnight.
This time around, I found horticulture to be far less anger inducing than when I was a kid. I would even venture to call it enjoyable. This was more real than the plastic cups I got in Hebrew school. It's true that I had grown up to be a little more patient than I was as a kid, but there was something else. This was my garden, my success or failure. Sean was there to help me to understand that when you plant a seed you take responsibility for it. It’s something outside of yourself and something that connects you with thousands of years of human evolution. I was repeating the same motions that my ancestors did, sowing, watering, and loving the seeds. One morning I woke and went outside to the garden. There in the dirt was the tiniest hint of green. My first seedling had sprouted. I went back inside and called my brother to apologize and tell him he had always been right.