The Tale of Fred, the new mascot.

So I was making copies for work at The Kinko's, Thursday, and as I was crossing the parking lot by their dumpster, there was a pathetic scrap of plant on the ground.


(This is a recreation of finding him. That's my kitchen floor, instead of the dirty asphalt.)

This is a close-up of his mangled-ness.



Now, his lower end was rotted black. His top end was rotted black. In the middle, he was all wilted, one of his leaves was torn, and I suppose the vine fell off or was plucked off. When I found him, he'd been stepped on and dropped and just hadn't even made it into the dumpster when they went to throw him away. I said, "Oh no!" And he said his name was Fred, and I felt very sad for him. And a little upset.

To me, this is the best analogy for throwing away a piece of pothos:

The screw fell out of my glasses. I have the screw. I have the screwdriver. I have the glasses. I will throw them away, because they are broken.

A pothos is the easiest plant in the world to save. You cannot kill a pothos. If you kill a pothos, you can make more pothos plants from the corpse. If you have a live pothos, you can make an exponential number of pothos. Four and a half years ago, Chris and I had one small pothos plant. Now, that plant has vines that are 8-10 feet long, and they're only that short because I kept cutting pieces from them to make new pothos. (There's one in the living room that's very bushy, there's one in the study/office thing there's another one in the music/craft room along with The Mama plant, there's one at Christina's...) If a limb breaks or rots off, you cut off the bad bits, you snap off a couple of leaves to leave the little root nubs open, and you stick the ends in a glass of water. And then it gets new roots, and you stick it in the dirt again. It just does.

So I rearranged my purse and my pack of copies and I picked up this wilty dirty thing, and walked home. When we got there, I knew he'd be my mascot. So I gave him a bath, to freshen him and get the footprints off.

I trimmed the rotted parts off.

I popped off a leaf.

And then I stuck him in a glass of water.

Here is a picture.

Looking very snazzy in his nice glass in the bathroom!

And here is a close-up of the places his roots will grow.


I will keep taking pictures of him every few days. He already looks a lot better--his leaves aren't curling and wilted anymore, and he looks full of Life. He's scarring over at the top end, but that's to be expected, I suppose.

So please, root him on (as he ROOTS hahahahaetc). He just needs a little Love.