Smelling the Roses

With the madness happening in the world, now is the exact time to stop and smell the roses. But what happens when you physically can’t smell them? How do we find the tiny pleasures when our senses are not functioning? It’s something that I’ve been grappling with since my test results came back as positive.

Tiny pleasures can be so many different things - my personal favorites right now include how well my cat cuddles with me through the night, cooking nutritious and delicious (?!) meals that I can’t really taste because of the loss of the sense of smell, and my plants.

Last summer, I became a crazy plant lady. It’s been one of the biggest delights of my life for the past 9 or so months. What started with a cutting drunkenly ripped from the basement of Bond45, turned into a full-blown obsession. Between two big orders from The Sill to kick off my collection, to ordering semi-rare plants online, to making excuses for going to Home Depot just to browse the plant section, I have bought (and lost/killed) a LOT of plants.

The current count is around 30 - I can’t decide how many of the plants I’m propagating count, right now it is only if they have roots - and I recently asked my dad to take cuttings from my childhood home and send them my way so that I can propagate more. But it brings me so much joy! I LOVE propagating. Seeing the roots grow in water, sometimes leaving the plants in water and other times trying to transfer them over to soil. I love the reminder that we’re all growing in ways that we might not be able to see, but are hopefully still growing.

What are you finding the tiny pleasures in these days? Cheerts to more tiny pleasures in 2020!