the fig trees go west

My gargantuan houseplants are dripping with symbolism.

Lately: There’s more going on than I care to type, which is why I’ve been absent for so long. (Sorry!) The essay below should give a clue about at least part of what I’ve been up to. I also caught a stomach bug — or had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic, or both. That happened while I was spending a weekend with my cat in a hotel. Do not recommend. March had some high points, but as its final hours tick down, I say good riddance.

the fig trees go west

After Thanksgiving in 2016, my mom offered me a cutting from her fiddle leaf fig. She’d cut and let it propagate it for several months. A whole universe of roots unfolded in a big glass vase.

I was impatient to get out the door. I had a date that night, and I wanted to get back to Chicago in time to freshen up. Still, I was intrigued by the idea of owning a houseplant. I’d never tried to care for one before, and I liked the idea of bringing a piece of nature inside. So I paused and listened to my mom’s detailed instructions: where to place the fig, what it meant if the leaves turned spotty brown, how to arrange rocks beneath the pot to help with drainage. I retained about half of what she was saying, my mind already 10 steps ahead, planning what I’d wear to dinner, what sushi I’d order.

It was a plant, after all, with five or six waxy, deep green leaves. How much trouble could it be? I carried it in one hand and set it on a windowsill until I found a pot.

A few weeks later, I found the time to buy soil and little blue piece of pottery. Too small, and not enough dirt. But I didn’t know any better. I found the fig a permanent home, by the window that looked from Lincoln Park south toward the skyline. The technicolor sunrises over the lake gave off enough light, I guess, because the fig went wild. After a few months, its leaves had tripled. A few months after that, it was practically a bush. And then it started sprouting toward the ceiling. It needed a new pot. It needed a trim. By springtime, I propagated it, sprouting the grandchild of my mom’s initial plant. By early summer, the baby fig was potted in my bedroom.

It was different from its mother. Its single trunk was thicker, and it grew up and only up, bending under the weight of its elephantine leaves. Each grew bigger than the leaf below it, and even the icy winter sun gave the upstairs fig enough energy to keep sprouting. I joked that my trees were magic. Or was I serious?

When I decided to move to D.C., one of the first things I did was research the best way to get the figs across the Appalachians. Moving companies won’t take plants across state lines, and there was no way these potted behemoths were going to fit in the trunk of my Honda CR-V. So I moved on to the next best option: I rented a 12-foot transport van, which I managed to parallel park on my narrow, one-way street on the eve of the move. I hired muscle, two men who showed up, lugged my precious figs down two flights of stairs, gave me a strange look and took off 10 minutes after they’d arrived.

Perched on a wadded-up pile of coats so I could see over the steering wheel and hood, I drove the figs 700 miles east. I only cried once, in the parking lot of a motel outside Cleveland. I got up the nerve to drive the speed limit by the time we hit Pennsylvania, and I tapped my brakes in the right lane coming down out of the foothills of Maryland. In D.C., the next round of muscle, booked on some fly-by-night moving app, never showed, and the van was due back. So my mom and I hoisted and dragged our leafy friends, bent over and insipid after a day crammed in the dark. Onto the deck we maneuvered them, then inside. Somehow.

The figs are enormous now. They’re great-grandparents, clipped and rooted ad infinitum. Their progeny are scattered all over D.C. and Chicago. One lives in the sitting room at our current house. It popped two new leaves last week, and they’re firming up, deepening in color. How long has it been since the girl with the brand-new boyfriend raced north on I-55 with a plant in the passenger seat? Long enough for her to date that guy and break up with him, to meet her husband and move to the East Coast. To host a wedding and adopt a cat. Long enough for the figs in her house to sprout 72 leaves between them, and that’s not counting the dozens that have spotted with age and fallen to the dirt.

Long enough for the girl to finally be ready to go home.

My husband and I are moving to St. Louis in May, and as we started plotting the logistics, there was never a question about what we’d do with the figs. There’d be another van, more men hired to hoist trees up steps and proffer raised eyebrows, shrugs. I know how this all sounds: impractical, frivolous. A waste of money. The lengths a girl will go for a piece of leafy home decor.

But hear me out. As I think about the looming move, I keep staring at the figs, at their rough bark and veined leaves, at the spots where their trunks fork, the result of so many trims. And I keep remembering. I think of the 28-year-old who saw these plants as proof she could take care of something other than herself. The 33-year-old in the middle of blowing up her life for a guy, who took them evidence she could do anything herself if she put her mind to it — evidence that if this leap turned into a crash, she could plot her way out in a 12-foot van.

And I remember how they were once just one, a tiny stalk in a chipped vase, portable, flimsy, as apt to wither as it was to thrive. I never considered the lengths I’d have to go to keep that single puny fig with me for so long. How could I have? But that’s life. It grows up around you, heavy and solid, and you stop expecting anyone else to understand why you’d ever drive some fig trees to the East Coast and back again. You just do it, because that’s who you’ve become.