Grammy Read and the Houseplants

My son is rereading The Chronicles of Narnia and that inspired me to get ready for our upcoming family reunion by writing some Chronicles of Grammy.

Grammy is Lillie Belle Munroe Read, born in September 1892 and died in March 1992, at the age of 99 years and six months.

I’m sure my cousins could write a ton more about her than I know. First of all, I’m one of the youngest of the 36 grandchildren, and second, I grew up one state away from Grammy while lots of my cousins were much closer geographically. But Grammy had a way of pulling you close no matter what your circumstances were.

One thing about her that delights my son is my account of Grammy and Houseplants.

After I graduated from high school, my parents moved away to a piece of property about six miles from Grammy and Grandpa. They built a house on it (with Grandpa’s help) and settled in. I visited when I had breaks from college and enjoyed going over to Grammy and Grandpa’s a lot.

My mother had a bunch of houseplants, but she always complained that she could never get them to grow as well as Grammy did. She’d take her houseplants over to Grammy’s house and let Grammy have them for a few weeks. They’d come home looking incredible, and if they were supposed to blossom, they’d have blossoms all over.

Grammy’s Christmas cactus always bloomed exactly at Christmas. She also had an Easter cactus and a Thanksgiving cactus, and they always bloomed exactly on the right holiday—even those moving holidays. My mother said Grammy’s secret was to use cheerful threats.

“Bloom, or I’ll throw you out!” she’d say to her plants. And they obeyed.

My plants don’t obey me. Grammy gave me a Christmas cactus that bloomed the first Christmas I had it. Then it went dormant and didn’t bloom for six years. It bloomed once more and then died.

I have adopted my sister-in-law’s plan: take care of them until they look pretty bad and then buy new ones. I combine that with the cheerful threat: “Recover, or I’ll replace you!” and they ignore me and die anyway.

Here are a few of my houseplants in various stages of looking great and looking like they need to be threatened . . .

Now that I look at them, they don't look too bad right now. Do you think they might be paying attention to my Grammy’s methods?

For further stories about my grandmother and her adventures, see the lists on my Munro and Read genealogy pages.