A M A HOMEBODY,so I wasn’t entirely shaken when the necessity of
social distancing became a reality. I looked for the silver lining. “OK,” I thought to
myself. “I’ll have time to finish the new book I’m working on, cook more, have some
quality time with my 7-year-oldand do some spring cleaning.” ¶ Now, weeks later, the
gravity of the situation is setting in. ¶ I’m running my business from my bedroom with
spotty internet.¶ Photo shoots for the new book have become truly “in house,” with a
skeleton crew of my husband and daughter. The three of us are working to establish
routines that include home schooling, fun and the chores that will make indefinite
isolation in our small home tolerable.¶ It turns out I’ll have more than enough time to
cook, clean and hang with my 7-year-old. And, of course, we are among the luckiest in
this difficult situation. We have a home. We can work from it. We have work! And so
long as grocers and delivery workers continue their brave and essential work, we will
have supplies.¶ Still, it’s hard not to feel anxious about the future.¶ So I take refuge in
plants. Plants are keeping me sane
right now. I’ve known about the magic
of plants since I was 13, when my psy-
chologist parents were teaching at a
university in Switzerland. One week-
end we visited the family home of a
colleague of theirs. One of their daugh-
ters was on the autism spectrum, and
her bedroom was full of plants — cas-
cading from the sloped ceiling, filling
the shelves and covering every horizon-
tal surface. It was magical. Her mother
explained that plants soothed her.
They soothed me too. So for years I’ve
filled my home with plants. And while I
tend to them, they tend to metoo.
I don’t have a therapist, but I talk to
my tillandsia. She’s a good listener and
helps me clear the air, figuratively and
literally. I can’t meet my girlfriends IRL
for a drink these days, but I can hy-
drate with Ficus Audrey. She’s very low
maintenance, unlike many of my hu-
man girlfriends.
And while my dear friends’ baby
showers are canceled, I FaceTime with
them while misting my pilea and reap a
whole lot of happiness when the little
pilea babies sprout from the soil.
And when I need spiritual guidance,
I turn to my Maranta leuconeura.
Every evening, his leaves fold together
in prayer. He’s more devout than I am
—I swear he prays all night long! — but
his daily ritual reminds me of the natu-
ral rhythms of this crazy world: night
and day, life and death, sickness and
health. I need these reminders. Plants
are friends, preachers, teachers, heal-
ers and therapists.
We have more than 50 plants in our
home, each with its own needs. Caring
for them might seem like a chore, but
my experience corroborates the re-
search showing a link between the
presence of plants and personal well-
being. The relationship I have with my
plants is a reciprocal one. For just alittle sunlight, water and love, they
clean the air and bring beauty and life
into our home.
Plants also remind me that things
aren’t always in my control. Some-
times, no matter how much I love and
care for a plant, it doesn’t thrive, and I
remind myself that I can’t control
everything. This is a lesson that ex-
tends from plants to pandemics.
And if all of my houseplants are
thriving and beautiful and I still feel the
walls closing in? Well, then I step out-
side on my porch and reach for another
plant friend, one that knows how to
make me laugh, smile and sleep, and
reminds me thatsometimesI’m the
one who needs repotting.
What lessons have you learned from
your plants?Designer and author Justina Blakeney
is known for her boho aestheticand
Jungalow website.Kirsten Ulve
For The TimesMY PLANTS
TAKE CARE
OF ME TOO
BY JUSTINA
BLAKENEY
F6 SATURDAY, APRIL 4, 2020 LATIMES.COM
U R FAMILY consists of
my husband and three
kids, ages 14, 17 and 20.
The thing about having
young adults is that, for
several years now, our
house has functioned much like an
Airbnb: Familiar-looking young people
root through the refrigerator and sleep
here at night but don’t interact much with
the property owners (unless we have a
noise complaint or they have a problem
with an appliance). Then the quarantine
happened.
Now, we are five near-adults in one
house 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
For some families, festering below the
fear and anxiety of how to survive the
pandemic is how to survive one another.
Being in family quarantine has given
me flashbacks to another less urgent and
self-inflicted quarantine: our 10-day RV
trip through Northern California when
our kids were 12, 9 and 7. My son has diag-
nosed ADHD. The three of them fought
like cats and monkeys. I washed dishes in
a micro-sink for 10 days nonstop. What
possessed my husband (I blame him) to
think this trip was a good idea is beyond
me. The kids remember the RV adventure
fondly, while I break out in a cold sweat
whenever I walk by a camper.
But my children are young adults now
and being home together brings unex-
pected moments of grace: family Rum-
mikub tournaments, nighttime walks
around the neighborhood, Scattergories
competitions, sleeping late, and rewatch-
ing old episodes of “Glee” and “Last Week
Tonight with John Oliver.” I notice my
14-year-old daughter and her 17-year-old
brother, enemies of old, enjoying a de-
tente in the TV room over Xbox and pop-
corn. I wonder how long it has been —
years maybe? — since our family of five
sat down together for dinner on a regular
basis. This is a silver lining.
But teenagers consume a lot of food,
and it feels like I’ve been cooking 24 hours
a day. I hate cooking on a good day. And
the cleaning up! By the end of the first
week of quarantine, I was filling the dish-
washer, running it and emptying it twice a
day.
“No more,” I said to my family of
adults.
I got out a box of Fiesta dinnerware for
four I had ordered on a whim last year. I
packed up all the white dishware and
replaced it with Fiestaware: one bowl, one
salad plate, one dinner plate and one mug
per person — each in a different color.
Every person now has his or her own
color-coded dishware. Now, when a cobalt
blue plate with melted cheese and pizza
crumbs is left on the table, I know im-
mediately which kid, I mean adult, to yell
at to wash and stack their dishes.
The pleasure and pain of this strange
family hibernation play out differently
each day.
I was able to celebrate my older daugh-
ter’s 20th birthday in person. She was
supposed to be at college in Connecticut
on her birthday, but of course that was
before the quarantine. So instead, she
woke up at home to a blueberry blintz
souffleon the kitchen counter. After
dinner, I threw a surprise party on Zoom.
A dozen of her school friends popped in
from the East Coast, Indiaand Kosovo.
She said I was “so extra,” but a mom is
still a mom even during a pandemic.
Prior to the quarantine, my husband
and I had eased into the teenagers-al-
ways-out, house-to-ourselves phase. Not
anymore. The offspring are distributed
into every room, and my husband has
taken to sitting next to me while I read —
and watching “Breaking Bad” on his
phone (without headphones). There
might be a baby boom in nine months,
but this “corona divorce” thing is real.
When I got married 22 years ago, a friend
shared the wise words of Kahlil Gibran,
“Let there be spaces in your together-
ness.” In quarantine, it’s more like, “How
about I go in the kitchen and we meet up
in the living room later?”
Humor is my coping mechanism. It
works well during the day. But, at night, it
is hard not to lie in bed and worry. My
husband is a physician. While we quaran-
tine, he continues to take care of urgent
patients. I worry about him. I worry about
my son with asthma, my daughter with
chronic sinus infections and my youngest,
who uses an EpiPen. I know life has totally
changed. And yet, some things never do.
This may be the last time the five of us
live together for an extended period.
Perhaps that’s why the other morningI
woke up and made another blintz souffle.
This time, cherry. Maybe panic-baking
blintzes comforts me during the apoca-
lypse? Maybe feeding the family makes
things feel normal? Maybe whoever left a
turquoise plate splattered with cherry
filling lying on the kitchen table will put it
away? I know exactly who did it.Robin Finn is the founder and creator of
Heart. Soul. Pen., an L.A.-based writing
course, and is working on a memoir.I MIGHT
NEED A
‘CORONA
DIVORCE’
BY ROBIN
FINN