Self-Quarantine Day 23 - Sally the Scallion

I've been growing my own pet scallion.

What seems like a lifetime ago, but was probably only three weeks, I read this article called "Stocking Your Pantry, the Smart Way" in the NYT.  I heeded a lot of the advice, making sure I had enough vegetable stock and lemons to last me awhile.  Tacked onto the end of the article was this little tip:

Scallions:  If you leave the roots on and put scallions in a container of water on the counter, you can cut off the green tops, and they will grow back three or four times.  My mom taught me this trick.

So I decided to give it a try.  I propped up a little stub of white stalk with the squiggly roots in a dish of water and watched it.  I looked at it every day sitting right there on my counter, just as the NYT had told me to do.  And nothing happened.  Fake news.

I sort of forgot about it, but one day I noticed that the white stump had elongated into a green shoot.  Wondrous!  I started watching more closely, admiring its progress.  It peeked out a tad more each day.  I lovingly changed the pungent water as I changed my cat's water.  Over the next week or so, it grew an elegant, lean leaf.

It began to stretch so far that it looked like a real store-bought scallion.  One fine day an additional green spike poked out from the side of the white part.  I marveled.

I talked about my scallion, crowing about its progress to everyone I talked to.  My sister named her Sally.  Sally the Scallion.  Sure, I was teasing myself about how preposterous it was that I was so alone and isolated that I had developed a relationship with a scallion.  But I also felt proud of what I had cultivated.  Last summer, I had greedily eaten some tomatoes from plants that I'd stuck in the ground, but I had never loved a plant as much as I love my scallion.

For my whole life, my mother has nurtured plants both inside and outside of the house.   Her yard is an explosion of flowers and greenery.  When my sister J and I were little and spent the summer splashing around in the pool, yelling at her:  "Look!  Look at me jump!  Look!" Mom nodded absently, bent over her garden beds that kept her sane in the long hours of making sure we didn't drown. She has so many flower boxes that she keeps one next to the trash bin so that she can admire it even as she does that mundane task.  Although I have long appreciated the beauty of her gardens and the taste of her homegrown vegetables, I never quite understood the simple joy that comes from tending to a growing thing.

Now, as nature ravages the world with a new virus, I am separating myself, cutting myself off from that terror.  Simultaneously, I'm learning to watch closely and patiently, to love a small green column.  In this season of rebirth, of spring and Easter, I'm mourning, and I'm celebrating.  I'm feeling close to my family and far from them at the same time.

I decided to cut Sally. In recent days, gravity has pulled her downward until her tip touched the counter.  I chopped her up and ate her on my quesadilla last night.  She was delicious.  I stuck her white-crowned roots back in the water.  The NYT tells me she will grow again.  I've since added some more scallion stubs to the water.  I'm eager to watch them, too.