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Caregiver
2 January 2023
During a brief respite from our caregiver duties on the sunny patio yesterday, we looked up from our book to find this remnant of potted basil looking back at us. We dismissed it idly and went back to reading Vonnegut's letters but it called for a second look.
Caregiver. Nikon D300 with 50mm f1.4 Nikkor at f11, 1/250 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
That scene, we thought, resonates with how we've been feeling. So we got up, grabbed the D300, put our 50mm f1.4 Nikkor on it and shot into the sun.
We weren't quite sure what about it had struck a nerve. We had to think about it.
We've learned to replant the small pots of basil we buy at the market into larger pots because they are always root-bound. Transplanting allows them to regenerate a few times.
But this particular plant is still in its original small plastic pot. It was never transplated. We took it outside when it started to fail, hoping it might revive. But it never did.
And we never got around to shaking the dirt free of the dead plant for reuse in another plant.
So when the rains came earlier this week, it got a good soaking. And when the winds came, it caught a green leaf. So when we looked at it yesterday, what struck us were those darkened dead stalks holding the green life in the decorative pot full of water, the elixir of life, as the lengthening shadows of the fruit tree in the background encroached.
There is a futility about the image.
For all the sun and water and even the green leaf of hope, the plant will not be revived. And yet what matters is not that inescapable fact.
What matters is not so much the body, which ultimately betrays us all, as the soul we embrace but never quite capture. Not the defeat but the attempt. The caring that is given, in short.
As Vonnegut quotes William Blake * somewhere in all those letters, "Go love without the help of anything on earth."