Hello, It's Me, Aloe
"ROOT ROT?" I exclaimed. "That sounds horrible! Can our baby get root rot, too?"
"Probably only if we water him too much."
It suddenly dawned on me that caring for this aloe plant was far more complicated than I'd anticipated, and I wondered if we should start over and work on "The Care and Feeding of Your Paramecium" instead.
I should mention here that I do come from a long line of green thumbs, so I was somewhat optimistic. My grandmother had a fabulous garden and lots of plants around the house, and so did my mom. Feeling confident, my first plant when I lived on my own was a ficus tree. It seemed really happy for the first week, but then one day I came home from work, and it had dropped every single leaf on the floor. It was completely bare. I had no idea what I had done wrong and decided it wasn't my fault. It probably had a gene for baldness, just like my grandfather did.
So the aloe plant was not actually my first plant, but it was my first plant with my husband, and I thought, since we would be raising a child together, it made sense to raise an aloe plant together. The aloe plant thought otherwise. Within two weeks, the leaves of our thriving aloe plant had turned yellow, and then brown, and then dead.
"You watered it too much," said my husband accusingly.
"That's true," I said. "But I learned an important lesson from this."
"What?"
"I should bathe our child infrequently."
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Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, "Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble," available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com.
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