Plant Hands

Letting go as a pathway to new life

BY SARAH WAYLAND-SMITH

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Spider mites.

What?

I think you have spider mites.

What are you talking about?

My mother sat behind me, perched in a goldenrod yellow chair encircled by a vibrant, almost pulsing swath of green in my floor-to-ceiling windows. I stopped washing the dishes and walked over to her with yellow rubber gloves still on my hands, shedding a few drops of soapy water onto the maple floor, and there, in the full illumination of the mid-day sun, I finally saw a barely visible latticework of webs covering the branches of my lemon trees. The spun threads, a telltale sign of an invasion of spider mites, floated back and forth on the flow of my breath. She was right and my heart sank.

Cleaning up after dinner one evening, I decided not to throw away the squeezed lemon husks, and instead carefully dug my finger through the translucent membranes to pull out the seeds. I sucked on each seed to remove the remaining pulp, reminding me of how we, freshly-made mothers, were encouraged by the maternity nurses to chew off the tiny nails of our babies’ fingers and toes, lest we cut their impossibly soft new skin with cold metal clippers. I tucked these seeds into dark soil beds and under an angled wedge of intense southern light, green shoots cast off their covers in just a matter of days. After a week or two, I moved the viridescent beginnings into their own small pots before their roots became too entwined with those of their siblings. There was a kind of magic to it: turning something so small, thrown away countless times before, into growing things. Weeks, months, years passed, and in what felt like no time at all, I had a small grove of lemon saplings living with my family in our apartment.

I was puzzled over how the invading mites had gotten into our home. Did they float through an open window, or were they stow-aways on our shoes coming home from the farmers’ market? Somehow these miniscule arachnids (no larger than this period   .  ) had gotten inside and silently crept up the branches to suck the sweet juices from the tender leaves. I had to admit there were signs of their presence other than the webs, like the sickly yellow stippled pattern which began to appear on the leaves. I had failed to notice their distress, caught as I was in a steady stream of feeding, bundling, and ferrying my three children to school every day. 

I felt a chiding guilt at my mother’s discovery, similar to having the school nurse call me to pick up my fevered daughter, having just dropped her off without thinking to take her temperature first. More than that, I imagined I felt the trees’ pain within my own body. I have been plagued for decades by another kind of mite, the ones that sleep in cottony blooms next to the legs of my bed and lie silently along the edges of my books. Dust mites, hiding in gray nimbuses blown into the corners of our apartment, feeding on our sloughed-off skin cells, set my living skin aflame. My eyes swell and my hands itch throughout the day and night, causing me to tear at my skin until it cracks and bleeds. I know what it feels like to be opened up in microscopic ways with my nerves exposed to outside elements, turning normally unthreatening things such as the juice squeezed from a lemon into searing pain. 

Always one to gloat about seeing a disaster before anyone else, my mother had added: once you spot the webs, the plants are goners. She told me it was time to throw the babies out with the bathwater before the mites spread to all the houseplants. Instead of those drastic measures, I took each leaf of every tree in my hand–one cupped, almond-shaped living appendage holding another–andgently, rhythmically  bathed both sides in clove oil-soaked cloths. But they grow so fast, from egg to nymph on to adulthood in just a few days. Soon those arachnids that I missed were back to feast again. I repeated the baths and sprinkled cinnamon on the soil. Sitting with my trees at night, the smell of clove and cinnamon drifted towards me, bringing memories of the sweet clove cigarettes we smoked in high school while sitting on back porch steps under a velvety dome pin-pricked with dots of light. I turn a leaf in my hand and see sunlight coming through the holes, openings like stars.

The trees fought by trying to distance themselves from the mites within the strictures of their limited mobility. One of the smaller trees shed all but five of its leaves in an effort to start life over. After a week, new clusters of leaves emerged from the thin branches, looking like curling claws of some strange green bird hatching talons first. Another tree dropped all the leaves from   its tallest branch and shot straight up another foot before it sent out new leaves. Each tree attempted a novel way of conserving and spending energy to protect their leaves from the mites, but nothing changed the direction we were heading towards. For my final furtive effort, I bathed the leaves in diluted rubbing alcohol hurting us both by  stinging my hands and desiccating the leaves even more.

My husband watched this battle go on for months. This is making me sad; it’s time to cut them down. He loved the lemon trees too, and I did wonder if I was just prolonging the trees’ pain. One day I took my metal clippers and cut down my little forest, branch by branch, and stuffed all the branches, mite-covered leaves, and soil into black plastic bags for the compost. I swept the floor, washed the pots and put away all my tools. Now, in the empty spaces by the windows, golden light settles in, curled in circles on the maple floors: idle energy resting quietly, waiting to bring new life into being.

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