Perhaps it all started when I decided to let my plant live. Poor straggler. My grammy gave it to my mother to give to me quite a few years ago. She'd heard that I had just lost my oldest spider plant to the bulimic snacking tendencies of my cat and offered up the plant in question as a hardy thing that should be nearly impossible to kill. She was right. It has been neglected and snacked on and it still has not died.
About a month ago, I came very close to tossing it in the dumpster out back. The plant was too far gone, I decided. It will never be healthy again; too much of it has died. I don't even know how to care for it properly--should it get more sun? Should I have it on a shelf so the running shoots can spread? Does it need a bigger pot? I am no gardener, and I don't know much about plants.
It felt wrong, though, to throw away a not-yet dead plant given to me by my late and loved grandmother. So I watered it, just to see. And green leaves showed up just a day or two later. Every few days I gave it a little bit of water and more leaves kept coming.
Just today I finally cleared away as much of the dead material as I could. It was a lot. And the plant is so strangely shaped now. And weak. And fragile. I'll have to find new ways of keeping the cat away from it. Soon I'll have to talk to someone who understands plants and who can walk me through the process of re-potting it. It needs more soil. Possibly a larger pot. But new leaves are still growing, and I may be able to hope for a healthy plant by summer.
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