What’s the Opposite of Green?

…because whatever it is, that is the color of my thumbs.

I cannot keep plants alive.  Cat, yes.  Iguana, no problem.  Children, so far.  But plants?  Not so much.

People often nod knowingly when I announce this.  “Oh, me too,” they say.  “I have the worst time keeping my plants happy.”

No, no.  Not, I have the worst time.  Not, keeping them happy.  I cannot keep plants alive.  Any plants.  I have, over time, radically eliminated a spider plant, an aloe plant, and an African violet.  Among countless, myriad others.

Not intentionally, mind you.  I’m not a plant serial killer, racking up thrills by elaborate torture schemes and reliving the crime later (speaking of which, though, how much am I loving the series Dexter?).  I try to keep them alive.  Sometimes I succeed just long enough to get my hopes up, and then something horrible happens and they droop, or turn yellow, or get spilled all over the floor, or simply disappear.  It’s sad, really.

Over the past few years, there has been a ray of light after a lifetime of dark, lifeless soil.  I’ve finally found plant-related success.  I still cannot keep a plant alive, indoors, for any significant period of time, but I can keep several big pots of herbs thriving outside by the front door, for culinary and gloating purposes.  (“Look!  They’re still alive!  And green!  And, did I mention, alive?”)  I can, with enough fertilizer and focus, create a satisfactory vegetable garden, though I haven’t had enough of either to even try since we moved here.  I can also plant bulbs, forget completely about them, and then do a spastic goofy elegant and refined happy dance when bright-colored blooms burst out of the ground with little to no warning.

So Emily and I just spent two hours – without a single argument or snipe or eye-roll – raking and digging and planting more than a hundred new bulbs in the little triangle of yard between the walkway and the house.  We’re branching out a bit, as it were, and trying some strawberries and lilies of the valley, on the theory that roots can’t be that much different than bulbs, gardening-wise.  It all feels so productive, and hopeful, and grown-up.

I can’t consider my thumbs to have attained full greenness, just yet, but they’re at least somewhere on the spectrum.  Chartreuse, maybe.