How Are We Coping?

Not with houseplants, that's for sure.

It’s December 21st, the first official day of winter. It’s also my father’s birthday. Happy birthday, dad. Here’s us with his birthday Bouche de Noel.

I started Weathered because, I thought, there needed to be a space to talk about change. As someone who often writes about buildings, the idea that these structures are built with an expectation of ‘forever’ has fueled a type of protest inside of me; if a building is a pinky-swear, then change becomes a breach of trust. It’s particularly unnerving as we live in a time of endless upheavals, so Weathered seemed like a way to talk about how change is inevitable and endless—the ways in which our selves, our municipalities, and our communities react to winter could serve as a metaphor for larger ideas around transformation.

Something I’ve been keenly aware of, however, is the idea of ‘coping’ with change. I think about coping mechanisms now, notably because many of my students this semester seemed particularly preoccupied with understanding how coping serves as a way to control what is mostly uncontrollable. 

Which brings me to my point: I don’t like houseplants.

Just this week, Dirt’s Sydney Smith penned a beautiful tirade against houseplants. “As symbols of the Instagram age, plants reflect the lives we want to lead, made to fit within the lives we’re stuck with. Like a beautiful Balinese orchid in full bloom at a Trader Joe’s, wrapped up in its plastic sleeve and ready to be brought to someone’s Mid-Atlantic home to die, we are making a tawdry show of what we have while we wait for things to get worse,” writes Smith.

Like Smith, I also felt a resonant pressure to acquire and meticulously care for houseplants. Nights at friends’ apartments were spent discussing monstera deliciosa and those pesky fig trees—all of those plants, it seemed, were dying. Was it root rot or too much sun? Should we replant them, or move them to a different corner of the house?

These conversations turned exhausting, as did the care I poured into keeping these fragile florae alive. My fascination with plant life turned toward the outdoors: From March through October I spend dozens of hours per week in my garden; living on Chicago’s west side, my favorite activity is wandering through vacant lots to pick wildflowers that have consumed the neighborhood fabric. Come the first frost, seed pods become the defining activity, cracking them open to reveal weird geometries and filled with next year’s bouquets.

In some ways, my houseplants have become a way I attempt to assert control over what is predictable and yet wildly ungovernable. I find little joy in it: This Christmas Cactus that never seems to bloom when the name dictates it should; misting a stunted fern feels like a desperate attempt to fight the arid conditions of the forced-air heating system. Recognizing that this life—staying in Chicago, where it remains frigid just long enough to forget what the city looks like when trees are in bloom—isn’t one I’m stuck with. It’s one that I chose and continue to choose. The Goldenrod outside will brown, my hair turns grey, and the ice will pour from the sky like some biblical catastrophe. These are not events I should cope with, but ones I should attend to the full range of dread and curiosity.

This dracaena trifasciata doesn’t want to live here, but I do.

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Thanks for reading Weathered. In the coming weeks, expect to read about designing to cope with seasonal affective disorder, antisocial sidewalks, frozen lakes as landscape, snow in Los Angeles, and much more.