For most of my life, I've thought of myself as having a black thumb - not green, not even brown, but black. Most plants put under my care took one look at me and died. This situation saddened me a bit, but I didn't obsess over it. I just gave up on plants.
Ten years ago, my company moved into new offices in San Francisco. My boss came by with three little potted plants and offered me one to welcome me into the new space. I asked her which one would be the hardest to kill, and she gave me a pothos. I looked it up online, learned that it belonged to the ivy family and liked to be moist, and developed a routine of watering it on Mondays and Fridays that seemed to suit it. Ten years later, it's still alive, and I'm constantly amazed.
In retrospect, I thought that I must have had some moral shortcoming to be unable to nurture a plant. So many people rave about caring for plants that I felt sub-human, a plant-killer.
Now that I have successfully tended a hardy little plant for an entire decade, I must conclude that my thumb is actually brown.
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