Growing

A feature of our new apartment that we’ve been appreciating more and more, especially as the weather’s turned for the better and we’ve developed cabin fever, is its balcony.

When I first got home, I let the balcony become a symbol it didn’t need to be. My husband and my dad understandably hadn’t noticed while touring what’s now our place that there’s a lip on the sliding door leading outside, a ledge too high for me to wheel or be wheeled over. These little barriers to accessibility are what usually annoy me the most. They tend to disproportionately affect me, and they often seem so unnecessary. The positioning of our fridge, for example, or how our front door is of the heavy safety variety, meaning that I can’t open it, let alone wheel myself to the hallway before it automatically swings shut. Slowly, though, we’ve managed to come up with practical solutions to a growing number of these impediments—even if what we cobble together isn’t always elegant.

My husband found an answer to the balcony-barrier problem in the form of a set of adjustable ramps. They’re not ideal since they’re too steep for me to roll myself over, but they unlocked a new part of our residence for me. Now assured that I’d be able to access the outdoor space, we made transforming it into a beautiful, usable one a priority in the settling-in process. It is, after all, what I see out the bedroom window during the stretches of day I spend in bed, and it’s what everyone sees when in our primary living space. It’s something else, too: a garden.

I’d always meant to grow plants on the back deck of our old place. In over ten years, I never did. It became a weird stumbling block, a pattern that inevitably repeated itself. Talk about how nice it’d be to have a garden; convince ourselves that this was the year we’d have a garden; procrastinate by growing a virtual garden in Stardew Valley; feel sad that it was now too late in the season to grow a real garden. Moving meant an opportunity to start afresh horticulturally as well as in almost every other sense, and start afresh we did.

I won’t bore you with a detailed account of how we arranged the balcony and acquired pots and plants. Said account would be long and boring. I will, though, tell you that plant-purchasing was a great source of enjoyment and joy and that placing our new plants in an aesthetically pleasing way that brightens both the bedroom and the living room was extremely satisfying. We’re now in the plant-care and plant-appreciation phase, which has proven the most enjoyable thus far. My husband has established and is maintaining a routine of watering our garden, and I’ve established a routine of watching him through the window as he does so. We’ve both established a routine of retreating to the balcony after dinner to enjoy, under the evening sun, what we’ve grown and continue to grow.