Plants

Hellie

We look at plants, and I pretend to know what each one is, even mumbling an entirely new species that sounds awfully close to the word "hamburger."

"What exactly is wrong with you?" Barbara flatly asks me. It's strange because it's the question I've asked myself all my life. Hearing it in somebody else's voice gives it a stronger edge I certainly don't care for.

"I could say the same about you," which I suppose I could with her blinding stripes and inability to read the room. The owner of this fine establishment seems to be studying us through the leaves of what I can only guess is a very large fern.

"I can't leave well enough alone. That's my problem." She takes up something short and cute (cacti of some variety?) in a tiny clay pot and lightly runs her fingers against the spines.  "You know, I've been at the same church for years, and years, and years, and have always played the ‘yes man,’ even if I knew something was off. I'd pray about it, sure. But never do anything about it. So that's my problem. I just stay."

Oof. It's odd having something in common with someone who's last name I don't even know.

"Well, I suppose we have the same problem then. I find myself doing a lot of staying too. Not a whole lot of living."

Barbara Ann jerks at the thought, tilts her chin up to the ceiling. Her eyes slit; the fine golden brown of her irises take me aback as she says, "Jesus said to him, 'Get up, take up your bed, and walk.'”

“Um....”

Suddenly, she grabs a basket of what seems like a variety of plants (more ferns?) and asks me the one question I've been avoiding this century and the one before.

"Want to change that?"