My Thelma & Louise

THELMA

 I've told this tale before, so if you've heard it--skip on by! 

The story begins around 1989.  I was living in Central Kentucky and teaching elementary school.  My closest friend had recently graduated and was also teaching music in the same county.  He was planning for his marriage and needed to shore up his finances, so he took on a evening job cleaning an office building.  The offices of an architectural drafting company to be specific.  Because I knew our time together would change once he was married, I would sometimes accompany him to this job and help him do it.  It shortened his evenings, and gave us time to talk and be together--mostly in the car on the way to and from the office building.

The last thing to do was take down all the garbage bags and toss them into dumpsters at the rear.  On one evening I espied the stalk of a plant.  Upon further investigation it was two little clusters of Snake Plant, Dracaena trifasciata--just stems and roots--cruelly tossed out by someone from one of the offices.  I rescued them then and there.  Re-potted them and have been their caretaker ever since, nigh on 38 years!

LOUISE

In 1994, they moved with me to Washington, D.C.  Winters they find a place inside.  Last frost to frost they live outside.  To my complete surprise and delight around 2018 they bloomed!  AND produced fruit!  I had no idea such a thing was even possible. 

As the years passed they added stalks and outgrew one planter after another.  When they hit their current homes, I realized that any larger and I would no longer be able to carry them.  So I stopped transplanting them.  Apparently the memo never got to them!  They just busted out!  Literally, they grew threw the upper trim of their fiberglass pots ripping the fiberglass apart.

Around this time, the only place they could over-winter was the window box in the dinning room where the two plants in the two windows left the dinning room nearly void of natural light and giving of a sort of Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock 1609 ambiance to the what otherwise was a cheerful place to eat a meal.

And so it was that in the autumn of 2022, I took Thelma and Louise to work and placed them in the foyer of my elementary school next to benches where people may wait for their appointments with staff.  They have lots of indirect light from enormous windows that rise to the second floor.  Lots a commotion and human intrigue to occupy their thoughts, and over the summer I placed them in the courtyard atrium in the middle of the school where they could be safely together outside.

But then things happened.  When I had surgery in June of 2024, they did not get placed outside.  This past summer, the same...  I noticed they were struggling back in the autumn of 2025, and by the winter, it was clear they needed a vacation from school.  So they're back home with me.  I've given them a serious culling, and their first feeding.  Last night the temps were in the mid-50's and a gentle rain helped cleanse them from the dust of two years spent inside.  I don't plan to return them to school before next autumn, if then.