Cuttings

Longer ago than I like to admit Mom taught me to start new plants from stems of mature plants. She called them Cuttings.

One late winter I started a pot of golden pothos with 4 cuttings from one of Mom’s plants. By autumn the leaves had grown over the edge of the shelf and the plant needed to be re-potted. I started four more pots from the first plant and they soon took over that shelf by the window.

I enjoyed botany and especially spending time with Mom. She wasn’t my mother, but she taught me to be strong, as if she knew the hard times that laid in wait for me – maybe she did. She knew teaching me to start a whole new life from something broken, something that would otherwise die would help me through heartbreak and hard times.

For a long while my perpetually strained economy only afforded me to start new plants from cuttings to green-up my living space. Plants made my place in the world seem less harsh, more lovely.

Sure enough, believing as Mom taught me, that when God closes a door He opens a window kept me going over the years. Many doors slammed shut on me. When I barely had any strength to keep going, God certainly opened windows. Not only so, but all along the way He led me to fill them with pots and boxes of cuttings.

Many years later when FirstBorn brought LoveOfHisLife home to meet me, she gave me a potted kalanchoe. Many months and even more miles afterward, pieces of that plant became another beautiful plant on the other side of the country. And a year or two afterward, I started another plant and then another… The new plants eventually made it back to my sons’ houses.

Recently the sight of kalanchoes growing in pots on my grand daughter’s bedroom window seat, brought a deluge of fond memories.

Granted, GrandGirl’s plants may or may not be from the same plants I carried back and forth across the country so long ago. I love the idea that they could be, so I never asked. Wherever they started I’m certain the rest of this part of God’s story will be great.

“The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom should I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom should I be afraid?”

Psalm 27:1 (HCSB*)

 

*Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)
Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers, Nashville Tennessee. All rights reserved.

Images courtesy Pixabay

 

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