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The little potted tree my mother-in-law sent me was overheated, dried out, crawling with bugs, and nearly dead when it arrived. She had bought it on clearance at a Wal-Mart in southern Indiana, and sent it to Indianapolis by way of my father-in-law. He put it in the back floorboard of his car, where it sat forgotten in the late summer heat for several days before he thought to give it to me. The sad little thing was only about a foot tall, and consisted of three woody stems braided together, with a few yellowed leaves — it looked like a clearance plant from Wal-Mart.
It seemed an odd gift; a tiny, half-dead leftover tree. If you're going to give someone a plant, after all, wouldn't it make sense to give them a pretty one? But my mother-in-law has a soft heart, capable of pity even for a tree, and she assumed that I would feel the same.
I might share her sympathy, but I lack her green thumb. Interestingly, this made the tree a better choice than a healthier plant. If her gift had come to me bright green, bushy and happy, I likely would have killed it, doing all the wrong things to try and keep it looking good. As it was, if the tree died, it would not be my fault, so I didn't do too much. I put it next to the sliding-glass patio door in my apartment where it could get some morning sun, watered it, and went off to work.
When I arrived home, most of the tree's foliage had been blown across my living room floor. I had inadvertently placed it beneath the air conditioning vent, and now it was down to just a few drooping leaves. Not knowing what else to do for it, I moved it to the spare bedroom, away from the vents, and figured I would throw it away once it was completely dead.
I didn't have a lot of time or attention to spare for the tree; my life was full, with a busy consulting job, family obligations, church. So it sat, mostly ignored, in the spare bedroom for several weeks. When I finally bothered to look at it again, I saw several tiny, pointed leaves. Not only had the tree not died, it was putting out new growth. I touched each individual leaf, amazed to see that every stem had a few. I counted them; there were eleven, all told.
We went to visit my mother-in-law, and she asked about it. I told her I thought it would die, but instead it seemed determined to live. Its efforts seemed so valiant, I decided to help it however I could. There wasn't much to do, and I didn't even know what sort of tree it was, so I had no idea what its preferences were as far as temperature, or plant food. I bought a mild insecticide and sprayed the soil to drive off the bugs. I made sure it had some bright sunshine. Mostly, though, I watched, as eleven little leaves became fifteen, then twenty, then thirty, then too many to count. Since it was pretty now, with its new growth, I found a spot for it in the living room.
One day a co-worker came by my apartment to pick me up on the way to an out-of-town assignment. He ran his own landscaping business on the weekends, so I asked him if he knew what sort of tree it was.
"It's just a little twisted fig," he said.
"Do I need to do anything special for it?" I asked.
"Looks happy to me," he said. "Water it. Might see whether it needs a bigger pot, now and then."
My little tree, which had been bare branches only weeks before, now had an identity. It was a fig. Since we didn't know how it had survived, my husband and I christened it "Go Fig."
And go it did. We moved to South Carolina, where some friends with a large potted fig told us to set it on our porch in the muggy Carolina heat. Go Fig loved the change. For the first time, it started to grow taller, rather than just greener. Two humid summers later, the tiny, half-dead gift plant is taller than my six-foot-tall husband, bushy with bright green leaves and backbreaking to move from room to room. And a gift that at first made me wonder what my mother-in-law was thinking, now makes me think fondly of my mother-in-law every time I see it.
Go Fig!
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