It's a good thing I transplanted my schefflera plant a few months ago, she says. When they get root-bound, they die a slow death.Those are her words, not mine—“slow death,” “root-bound,” “transplanted.” When I first told her about it I used the words “put into a bigger pot,” because I am uneducated in the language of gardening.“You have a green thumb like me,” she decides, when I send her photos of my sunroom—the schefflera plant growing crooked but robust next to the spider plant that's out of control and the bamboo plant that's almost as tall as I am. It's true my plants seem happier in my new studio where I live alone, but I can't help it, I bristle. She is still, after all this time, insisting I am like her, based on very little evidence.“I'm a known plant-killer. They're only thriving because my windows face south,” I fire back, insolently, as if I'm still ruled by my hysterical amygdala, as if I'm still the teenager who slammed their bedroom door so many times she took it off its hinges.“Plants are SO GOOD for the air in your home. I do not have to tell you they clean the air and give you oxygen,” she replies, ignoring me, telling me anyway. And then: “I have lost a couple really nice plants for no apparent reason. They will look super healthy and massive and within two weeks they're dead. No idea why that happens. It sends me into a panic!”When I don't reply, she sends another text that says she is “happy about our new correspondence.” She sends a cat emoji that has hearts for eyes and I can't help it, I smile—at the inappropriate emoji, the awkward phrasing. I am, in fact, like her. There's plenty of evidence. Nobody can love you like a mother. Nobody can hurt you like a mother.I have tried to tell this story before. Once I tried to tell it through fingernails, hers and mine, how when I was small and she was watching TV or reading a Stephen King paperback or, more likely, both at the same time, she'd tell me to lay on my stomach, roll up the back of my shirt, use her fingernails to trace gentle patterns along my back.I learned a lot about fingernails, working on this essay, which is bogged down with clichés and mixed metaphors. “She teaches me to be careful, transform potential scratches into whispers: a lazy lullaby of hushed caresses,” I wrote, earnestly. I learned it's a myth that our fingernails keep growing after we die—it just looks that way because flesh shrinks as it dries out. I learned that our fingernails are made of a tough, protective protein called keratin, that this protein is found in the hooves and horns of powerful beasts—buffalo, rhinos—and also that this protein is made of practically nothing: the cells of dead skin.I took the fingernails essay to a community workshop and nobody was impressed. “I don't understand the fingernails as an image system,” they repeated, one after another, wrinkling their noses. I nodded like I understood. I was so ashamed I quit the workshop. I even quit writing, for a time, deciding: Some stories are untellable.I grew up in a house at the bottom of a hill, not on a corner but on a wide, smooth curve, Sherwood Forest beckoning across the street. In the summer I'd watch from my bedroom window as they emerged—the joggers, the other people's moms with their strollers, the couples with their dogs—and in the winter everything glistened silver, the naked trees standing stark and still against a velvet sky.The forest looked menacing, but it wasn't very deep, and a few years after we moved in they built a boardwalk that would lead us all the way to the pond without getting our sneakers dirty. In fact it was the hill that was dangerous—plenty of accidents, like the time the neighbor girl went careening down on her new two-wheeler and got scared of the speed but only pressed one of the handlebar brakes. It was the wrong one. Her front wheel stopped and skidded while her back wheel kept spinning, sending her headfirst over her handlebars so that her chin was the first piece of her to smash into the asphalt.There was blood everywhere, so much blood, like the time, years earlier, when I was learning how to ride a trainer two-wheeler myself and could never remember that to brake, I simply had to pedal backwards. She forbade me to ride my bike with sandals on but I was just going down the block and back, turning around in a neighbor's driveway, what could go wrong, in such a brief time, not even a window but a sliver?I was five, maybe six, so I miscalculated. I entered the driveway too fast, I was headed hard and straight toward the back end of someone else's mother's minivan, and I braked the only way I could remember how: by dragging the tops of my exposed feet against the rough surface of the concrete. I don't remember getting home, whether I rode back or limped. I don't even remember what it looked like—the skin on my toes shredded and flapping off like phone numbers at the bottom of a flyer, if I had to guess. I don't remember the blood, or how long it took to heal, or when I finally learned to brake without using my body. Or maybe I never learned. Maybe that's why I never went down the big hill, myself, unless I was walking it with my own feet: because there is always a bottom, waiting. You think it can't hurt you because it's wide and smooth like the seat of a swing or the side of a balloon, but you don't need sharp edges to split yourself into pieces.I was always afraid of her until I wasn't. That's what I remember: the fear and the dread, low-grade and constant, and that heady champagne feeling, a little like joy, those rare times it lifted. I remember sitting on the edge of the bathtub, sniffling, while she cleaned out my wounds with soap and water and hydrogen peroxide. I remember the sting of the Neosporin and then the relief, how she pressed a tiny bandage around every one of my tiny toes.As part of our “new correspondence,” she mails me a COVID care package for Halloween. Inside are two homemade masks, three disposable ones, and a small Ziploc baggie containing three Dove chocolates. “I hope this finds you well and rested,” reads the card inside the package, with a sloppy smiley face.The card describes the masks, which she stitched together with her own two hands, and how to adjust the earloops. At one point she's scribbled, nonsensically, “casemeng,” then crossed it off and scrawled “CASING” in all caps above it. The card ends, “Take care of you and Cloo!” Cloo is my dog, who she's never met. The dot of the exclamation point is made of a heart and the heart is exactly how I remember her drawing her hearts—without a point at the bottom, like a little butt, one unbroken line meeting itself back where it began.I think she must be trying to make up for something: the time she hurled a shoe at my sleeping head, maybe, because I left it on the wood floor instead of the rug in the laundry room. “Do you need any masks?” she asked me, a few weeks ago, after texting a selfie of her and my dad, smiling with their eyes above masks hand-stitched out of a dragon-patterned fabric. “We just finished Game of Thrones series, renewing my love of dragons.” When I didn't reply, she followed up, twelve hours later: “I made masks for all my coworkers, too!” I actually didn't need any masks, but I told her I did anyway.When Illinois enters COVID Phase 3—“It boils down to this: If you don't need to do it, don't,” Gov. Pritzker explains in a press conference—she sends me a text: “Will you and Cloo be OK?” When I don't respond, she follows up with three photos of an enormous orange leaf: the leaf lying on the ground next to her foot. The leaf lying on the ground next to her other foot. The leaf lying in the seat of one of her kitchen table chairs, sitting quietly like it's waiting for tea.“How high does the sycamore grow? If you cut it down, then you'll never know,” she texts me, with some musical note emojis. I recognize this line from “Colors of the Wind,” a Disney song I loved when I was young. Maybe she forgets that I'm not young anymore, that I barely remember loving problematic movies like Pocahontas or Maisy books or all the things she insists still remind her of me: “You are my beloved daughter and that will never change.”She states this simply, as if she's stating a fact: Madison is the capital of Wisconsin. There are twelve months in a year. But it was always changing, back then, back when I was still, in fact, young, when my life was arranged around her mood swings and I had to tiptoe around them as if I was sneaking out at night. When I turned eighteen I left on a promise to all my selves, my angry, aching younger selves and my stronger, better future selves, the ones who'd need nothing and no one, that I'd never go back. Now here we are in the present, me thirty years old, older than she was when they had to drag me out of her womb three weeks past my due date, and look at us clinging to what we remember, or what we think we know, or what's the difference?A few months ago, before we started our “new correspondence,” I spent a whole morning tearing apart my kitchen looking for a recipe I never found. She always called her Italian lemon cookies a word that sounds like cat-soop-ee, but when I looked up variations on how I thought it was spelled—“cadsupe,” “catsupe,” “cadsupee”—Google was confused: “It looks like there aren't any great matches for your search. Try using words that might appear on the page you're looking for.” Google suggested, “Did you mean cadsup?” Google suggested, “Did you mean Italian gossip?” Google suggested, “Did you mean cat sugar cookies?” I found a picture on Google Images that looked like the cookies she used to make, dense little swirls and S's smothered with a sweet lemon glaze, posted on a website called Proud Italian Cook. But these cookies were called “anginetti,” and when I scrolled through the comments, nobody corrected the author with the language I've known my whole life. I blinked at my laptop, wondering, What other half-truths have I been surviving on?“I love sycamore trees,” I read, now, in her text message that's so long the whole thing doesn't fit on the screen of my phone. “I have ever since we had one in the backyard of our first home. Every fall I wander around on my walks with my eyes peeled to the ground looking for leaves, whistling away tons of time I should be using otherwise . . . ”What does “need” mean in the realm of love, in the realm of loneliness? Mothers are a universal source of suffering, I remind myself, when I zoom in on the photo of the leaf sitting on the chair and realize I'm crying. “You know so much about plants!” I reply, finally, praising her. Immediately, she agrees, with a silly-face emoji, “I know enough to be dangerous.”I have tried to tell this story before. Once I tried to tell it through objects, an inventory of things that once belonged to her. I wrote about how I still have her cowboy boots, though I haven't worn them since I was young enough to need a fake ID; how I still have the books she read when she went back to college in her forties, though I don't know what made her dog-ear those pages, underline those passages; how I still have the ceramic rabbit she sculpted in a high-school art class, an ugly alien thing with eyes too far apart and awkward, flat paws raised up like hooks, like weapons, and two pasted-on ears that broke off from the pressure when I placed it—carefully, I thought—on a shelf between two heavy books.“There is a safety in objects, material possessions, the way they behave reliably and are always there where you left them,” I wrote, over-explaining myself as usual. “Colossal absence.” “The black hole around which so much of me has revolved.” Blah blah blah. When I broke the ears off the rabbit I sat on the floor with the superglue squinting through my tears, not understanding what was happening, a faucet twisted open and left running straight into the drain.I tried to ski on a school field trip once, when I was thirteen, and opened my head on an iron pole like an overripe peach dropped onto concrete. I don't remember much of the during: just the blinding white all around, blankly patient, steady and unwavering, the stranger screaming “Oh my god” when I tried to stand up and rolled backwards instead, the pressure of his puffy gloves at the top of my skull, the way they looked after a couple of seconds, saturated with something dark and slick and glistening, my earmuffs must look the same, my scarf too and my winter coat and then the fear and the dread because she was going to be angry.After that, nothing—not the swift ride down the mountain, on something like a sled but narrower; not the fifteen pieces of stainless steel they stapled into my scalp to hold it together, those two red trenches angry, angry, angry; not the four-hour drive from the UP back to Green Bay, Wisconsin, my English teacher worrying behind the wheel.What I remember is her face, when I walked in the door, and how she wasn't angry. She handed me my swimsuit and told me to climb into the bathtub and I wasn't afraid of her, then, sitting there goosebumped and shivering with my knees pulled against my chest. That's what I remember: how I wasn't afraid of her, when she turned the water pressure as low as it could go and used her calloused hands to shampoo my hair, my scalp, caked with blood and pus from my oozing wounds.“How's that?” she asked, gently, referring to the temperature, which was warm but not hot, like the winter sun through a windowpane. She steered the showerhead through my hair with such tenderness, following closely, carefully, with the same fingers she used to snatch cookies off a tray fresh out of the oven, barehanded; the same fingers she chewed open to bleeding while talking to someone on the phone—a neighbor, her own mother, someone else's mother; the same fingernails she'd drag back and forth along my spine, gently, those nights after she'd made me cry so hard I couldn't breathe. “Shh, shh, you'll make yourself sick,” she'd whisper, and I'd know I could stop being afraid. I'd know I'd made it safely to the soft landing of her forgiveness, the blank, dreamy lull that always followed the crash.She needed me, too, back then, but how could I have known? Some pain goes away when you sit inside of it. My wounds healed; most wounds do. When the doctor removed the staples he handed them over and they gleamed hard and bright against my palm. These days, when I shave my head, the clippers drag their sharp teeth against my scar tissue and the scar tissue screams: two tidy crescents, back to back, curving away, away, away.As part of our “new correspondence,” she mails me a package for Christmas. “Just a lil sumpin,” she texted, when she told me to be on the lookout for a FedEx delivery. Inside the package is a cookie tin in the shape of a bear, with a painted-on sweater and two fuzzy cotton balls for ears. Inside the tin are Christmas cookies, saran-wrapped and tied off with red ribbon she's twisted carefully into pretty little bows.“Last year I decided since I'm the one who puts in all the work on the cookies I will only make the cookies I like,” she texted me earlier in the week, before the FedEx text. “NO MORE PEANUT BLOSSOMS!” It was the week leading up to Christmas and she'd been texting me every day—little updates about her own mother, her job, the books she's been reading. I kept not responding and she kept asking me if there was anything she could do, reminding me, “I'm here.” I didn't understand so I didn't know what to say back. I was excruciatingly lonely but I didn't remember telling her that. Maybe she just had a bad feeling. She always used to say she had some kind of psychic intuition connecting her to me and her brother Mark and it made me feel so special—Me, out of all your kids? Mark, out of all your brothers?—and it also made me feel trapped, like I'd never be free of her.I was wrong, of course. It was so much easier than I could have predicted to get free of her, to get gone. The peanut blossom text made me laugh so I finally responded, asking if she still makes the candy-cane butter twists that are my favorite. She never replied, but she texted a photo later in the week, candy-cane butter twists fresh out of the oven, and now here they are inside the tin—my favorite cookies I haven't tasted since I was a teenager.I think she must be trying to make up for something: maybe the time I promised it wasn't me who used her hair spray (it was). She told me devils come in the night to take lying little girls to hell. She made me sleep with my windows open. I think of her gnarled, arthritic hands, twisting up the batter for the candy canes just because I mentioned they're my favorite. I think of the pads of her fingers, gnawed shiny pink and raw, tying the cheap ribbon into pretty little bows.My ivy plant started dying right before we started our “new correspondence,” before she texted me in early September on the day of my little brother's wedding, the wedding I didn't attend, with photos of the ceremony and a flourless chocolate cake she found “worth noting.” It was our first contact in many years. I'm still not sure what made me reply.Until then the ivy had been flourishing, four leafy arms creeping around in the shadows of my bedroom, dangling from the ceramic pot tucked away in the corner of the bookcase. One by one, for no apparent reason, the arms got crispy and then they got brown, and then all their leaves curled up like they were protecting something precious—a pearl or a tiny beating heart. I kept snipping off the dead arms about an inch above the soil, assuming they were diverting nutrients from the ones that still had a chance, but the ones that still had a chance kept following suit anyway. Sadly, I placed them all at the bottom of my plastic trash can, watched them curl up like the shed skins of snakes.When death came for the third arm I panicked. I moved the ceramic pot to my desk in the sunroom, where the light would touch it every day. This seems to have saved the fourth arm, which continues creeping upwards along the wall as if it's searching for something. There's a long, mysterious stretch in the middle where no leaves grow at all.“If you cut off that long piece the plant will grow more from the pot,” she suggests, when I send her a photo.“Cut off the dead piece? Or the top of the green?”“If you pinch off the new growth you will force the plant to grow more from the base,” she explains. “I would also cut off the dead part, but you don't want to do too much pruning all at once. It might shock the plant.”After a few minutes, she adds, “Plants are tender things.”I don't want to force the ivy to do anything it doesn't want to do naturally, but I'll remove the dead arm like I've removed all the dead arms. I haven't yet because for a while I thought it was recovering—the leaves have stayed green even though they're so dry they rustle like the pages of an open notebook when a breeze sighs through the window screens. I kept looking at it and blinking, thinking, Maybe it's possible for a plant to come back from the dead.But now, when I move to inspect it by grasping the base between my fingers, the dead arm slides right out of the soil. As if it never had roots at all.I have tried to tell this story before. Once I tried to tell it through chestnuts, how they explode all over your oven if you don't cut them just right, how even cooked and softened they still refuse to yield, refuse to let you in past their little skins. In this essay I wrote that her primary form of physical contact with me, when I was growing up, was the smickle: a game in which she'd smother me with a pillow while tickling me under the armpits until I peed my pants. But now that we're speaking again, I worry that's hyperbole. She wasn't a hugger, a cuddler, a coddler, but what about the fingernails, and what about the buzz of that showerhead up against my bleeding scalp, and what about the French braids she pulled my hair into until I learned how to do it myself, until I didn't let her anymore? What about those nights she'd rub Vaseline into the tops of my hands, they'd get so dry in the winter they'd crack open, and they were itchy, too, so I'd scratch them with my own fingernails, ripping up the spiderweb fissures so they'd bleed and bleed, and she'd sit on my bed smoothing thick gobs of the cool jelly into my skin, lovingly and evenly, pasting together all the points where I'd accidentally torn myself apart?The chestnuts essay got published in a well-known literary magazine and the editors nominated it for a Pushcart Prize and when I got the news she was the first person I wanted to tell. Of course I didn't, because I couldn't. I hope she never finds a way to read it. It's not easy to bear the way your parents see you, but I could never bear the weight of a child like me: the expectations folding in on themselves, the inevitable betrayal.The night she was teaching me how to make brownies, I can't place it in time. She tried to dump a cup of cocoa powder into a saucepan and it stuck, then exploded in a dirty cloud, all over the stove and her face and the front of her sweater. I blinked and waited. She blinked, then laughed. She laughed and I laughed and we laughed, we laughed.Sometime in middle school, when Kayla S.’s mom walked up to me in Family Video and snarled, “I'd like to kick you like a football.” Kayla S. was mean and I knew I was meaner but I didn't know how to defend myself against anyone's mother so I froze and I blinked and suddenly there mine was, tall and unmerciful and looming. To this other mom: “Excuse me? What did you just say to my daughter?” Planting her feet and handing me the keys: “Go get in the car.”The morning she stood at the edge of the driveway, holding a ratty green hoodie around herself against the Wisconsin January cold. There had been a fight and her face was unlined, weary, maybe even sad, though I wouldn't have called it that then; I'd never seen her cry. She called to me across the street as the elementary school bus pulled up: “Do you want a ride to school today?”On the road somewhere, when I asked her, scornfully, “Why did you even get married?” I was a teenager in the passenger seat of her minivan, using a hot-pink sharpie to doodle on the tops of my bare feet on the dash, wondering about affection and how it never flickered between her and anyone, let alone my dad, they barely exchanged words and when they did they were angry ones, sharp-edged and loud. She was quiet a moment, and then she shrugged, “Because I fell in love.” We hit a bump and my wrist jerked, sending a long slash of ink crooked across the blue veins under the thin skin of my foot, and I stared at the wrongness of it with my mouth hanging open because her answer was so inadequate, so embarrassingly incomplete. Love, alone? Love, alone, enough?During dinner not long before I left, when my sleeve slipped and she noticed the blood drying on the underside of my forearm. I'd been carving words into it with a boxcutter and in the moment she shrieked, “Are you punishing me? How dare you? How dare you?” But later, when she thought I was asleep, she crawled into my bed in the middle of the night. She wrapped her limbs around my body and wept.In writing, anything can be anything: fingernails, arbitrary objects, chestnuts exploding in the oven, windows and side doors and slivers of time, all ways to transform a story, all these inadequate words, into something tangible and legible and mine, all mine. Watch while I fill it in and then clip it off—clean, simple, there, done, look at her scattered all over the bathroom tile. Watch it yield when I sink my teeth into it, look how it falls to the floor and shatters when I decide to let it slip from my fingers, me, my decision, all mine. When I decide to let it go.I am trying to tell it differently, this time. I am trying to tell it, now, not through anger or violence but its aftermaths, its afterglows, these moments I wasn't afraid of her, moments hidden inside other moments. I am trying to pull out their insides like I'm gutting a pumpkin, lay them all out on a flat surface, hold fistfuls up to the light, because if I collect enough of them, if I trap enough of them with language, I might be able to reconcile the facts of our “new correspondence,” which exists exclusively in the realm of one-way care packages and text messages containing gardening tips and photos of our respective pets, snuggling up against our thighs. Maybe I will be able to write over it, blot it out, what I mostly remember, because mostly I remember her mean. I remember her angry. I remember her face contorted and her voice raised and red and coming for me—“Not as sorry as me”; “There's no excuse for you”—and I don't care for these other moments, these afterglows I haven't tried to remember until now, because in order to continue waking up without a mother, walking the dog without a mother, going to work without a mother, rubbing Vaseline onto my own hands every night, first one and then the other, never both at the same time, never with as much patience, I have needed to remember her mean. I have needed to remember her nasty, cruel, one-dimensional, I have needed to remember saying nothing and climbing onto the bus, that morning she offered me a ride, staring straight ahead as it pulled away, feeling guilt like a bone lodged in my throat, feeling, too, something blooming, nauseating but triumphant, like pushing on a bruise to see where it hurts: the power of choice, of being the one who goes away.Tell me what to do with it now—the bulk of what I remember, what I think I know, the overwhelming evidence. Tell me, now that she is so old, medicated, not angry anymore, so changed that I am starting to doubt the map of my life I've held in my head, the narratives I've constructed to explain myself to myself. I hear her voice, the nasty one, the thing she'd always say whenever I had something to tell her but it slipped to the tip of my tongue and I couldn't remember: “Must have been a lie.” That was one of her favorites, as vintage Mom as “Not my circus, not my monkeys,” she'd never parrot anything as trite as “Hindsight is 20/20” or “Forgive and forget,” a particularly stupid one because the words are arranged in the wrong order.I am, in fact, like her. There's plenty of evidence. Nobody can love you like a mother. Nobody can hurt you like a mother, except maybe yourself.As part of our “new correspondence,” she mails me a package after New Year's. It contains two jigsaw puzzles she has “deleted” from the inventory at the library where she works, because they are missing pieces. “I always get first dibs on taking them home,” she explained, earlier, in a text. “They are only missing 1–3 pieces, so no big whoop. FREE is good. Let me know if you do them a lot and I will send them your way when I'm done with them. I hate the idea of them ending up in a landfill.”I think she must be trying to make up for something: all the years she wasn't my mother and I was neither her daughter nor beloved, all the years there's been a her-shaped hole in the landscape of my life, the years that have marched on and on, away from the afterglows, the slivers of time when we claimed each other, when we belonged to each other, no big whoop, in the grand scheme. No big whoop, like the crescent moons of clipped fingernails dusting the top of the garbage, which is to say: gone.I've been ignoring her texts again. They're piling up and up: “Hi Jackie. Just checking in.” “You doing OK? Just wanted to make sure you were OK.” “I broke my baby toe again,” with a nauseating photo. “It is so swollen and uncomfortable. I miss my regular toe.” A gif of Winnie the Pooh climbing down some speech bubbles which spell out, “Love you SO MUCH!” When the gif ends, Pooh raises his arms triumphantly and three little red hearts float out.This morning, while I was working on this essay, she sent another: “Remember your skiing accident? Remember how I had to help you rinse all the blood out of your hair and I had to pull out some of the strands that got caught between the staples? There was so much blood. You slept in my bed and I woke you up every couple hours to make sure you didn't die in your sleep. I lay awake all night listening to you breathe. Remember?”Something nervous shivered along my spine, as tangible as a spider or a centipede or another wispy kind of thing, a thing with many legs and a body like eyelashes. I don't remember the last time I talked about the accident with anyone. I never told her I've been writing about her, our relationship, my childhood. I definitely don't remember sleeping in her bed.Me, out of all your kids?The overlaps, the contradictions.Remember? Remember?The windows and the doors.I have tried to tell this story before and every way I've tried to tell it feels wrong. Or maybe every way I've tried to tell it was exactly right, at the time, and it's the way I'm trying to tell it now that's so inadequate, so embarrassingly incomplete, now that all I really need to say is this: She is my mother, mine, and I forgive her. I forgive her because I can't help it, because of a simple fact that underlines certain kinds of loss: Any choice can start to feel hollow, flimsy, like a bad copy, even when we name it “necessary,” even when we tell ourselves we're better off alone. I forgive her because love alone is an adequate answer, love alone is enough, because she is my mother and I need her to be my mother, as long as she is still around to be my mother, no matter what that looks like. She is my mother and I can't help it, I forgive her and I love her, ferociously, unmercifully, against my will, even, and I'm so sorry, younger “I,” for this weakness, for this ultimate betrayal, but she is my mother and I need my mother and I don't know a creative way to say that.I think about all the other moments that must be rolling around her memory but not mine, round and fat and golden. She would spit them out, one by one, into my hands. I wouldn't eat them, I wouldn't be able to swallow. But I would drop them, carefully, into my pocket. Later, I could throw them away. Or I could plant them into the ground, like seeds.My schefflera plant is dying again. It didn't happen suddenly or even all that noticeably—just the leaves near the base turning from green to yellow, their stems going limp so that they scatter to the ground when I brush them with the pads of my fingers. I take some photos and text them to her, with an anguished emoji. “What should I do?”She points out that the soil looks dry and then she asks a lot of questions. “Did it recently get exposed to some cold? Too much sun? Has it lost a ton of leaves? How big is the pot? Can you stake the plant? Have you been watering with cold water? Room temp is better. Have you ever fed it? I take a small amount of Miracle Grow powdered food and mix it in a gallon jug of water so the water looks just slightly blue and I use that to feed my plants for a month.”The plant lives next to the windows in my sunroom, which is uninsulated and unheated. “Maybe it doesn't like the cold,” I agree, “but I don't have windows anywhere else so I'm not sure where to put it so it stays warm but also sunlit?”She suggests I move the plant further away from the window but leave it in the same room, so that it can be sunlight-adjacent. In her experience, only cacti need direct sunlight. Somehow the plant will be able to detect the presence of sunlight in the room, even if the light never actually falls upon it. Plants just appreciate being in the general vicinity of the sun, she tells me. They “like to have a stable temperature in which to grow.”I feel doubtful about this plan, which seems approximately as scientifically sound as leaving a book open next to your pillow so your brain can absorb its contents while you sleep. But I also don't have any better ideas.Obediently, I move the plant to the end table on the other side of the sunroom, against the wall instead of the windows.I watch skeptically throughout the day as the slashes of sun move across my floor, never touching the table, never touching the plant.I pat the soil and feed it cups of room-temperature water.I blink and wait.I wait.