HEART BEAT: Precocious Winter Days

By Felicia Mitchell

Winter doesn’t begin for another month, yet winter has begun.  Winter is thus, I think, like old age.  You don’t wake up old one day, having left “young” behind the day before.  You ease into it.

Snow, one sign of winter, though not the only one, fell a few weeks ago.  By then, I had carted in the annuals growing in pots on the front and back porches.  I was ready for frost.

Or was I just trying to cheat winter by introducing non-native plants to my house?  After all, my six-foot rubber tree doesn’t belong here, not in Meadowview.  The Ficus elastic belongs in India or Malaysia or some other frost-free landscape. 

I guess that’s why I bought it.  I had just moved here and was learning to adapt to winter.  Every time I’d walk into Kroger, I’d be greeted by some plants thriving under fluorescent lights.  Twenty years ago, I bought a little rubber plant.  And?  Little plants grow up.  They become big responsibilities. 

Who am I to decide if a plant has run its course?  I have the worst time just pruning a bush.  Ask my husband.  When a houseplant or flower enters the autumn of its years, I am just as likely to let winter snatch it as I am to pull the weeds in my overgrown tomato patch.

Sometimes I try, and I’m not entirely unsuccessful at letting nature take its course.  Out in the woods, near a bench where I like to sit, even in winter, there is an old blue plastic pot with what is left of an impatiens I did not bring in.  It is proof that this plant thrives from early summer to first frost.

Meanwhile, in my picture window that overlooks a yard full of autumn leaves and leafless trees, there are four potted geraniums that bloomed through the summer.  Tempting fate, I brought them in the house in October, where they languished, starved for sun, so I just took them back outside and lined them up by the compost pile, waiting for a freeze to get them. 

Every day, I walked past these plants, enjoying the leaves that were somewhat protected under the eaves of a house where the bats had already flown the coop for warmer climes.  As much as I enjoyed the leaves, I psyched myself up, knowing that morning I’d walk outside and find my geraniums gone the way of the impatiens.

Geraniums belong in temperate climates, don’t they?  I guess I have decided that my house qualifies even if it’s not nestled by the Mediterranean.  It’s always warmer inside than it is outside.  Why not take a chance on summer gracing my wintry outlook?

Hearing the weather report for this past weekend, anticipating snow and low temperatures, I lugged the four geraniums back in to the picture window, one by one.  There they should remain all winter, not far from the rubber tree, tempting me with the possibilities of flowers and winter and old age.