The fern

It has become an annual rite. Every summer's end my next-door neighbor Barbara comes to the door with a large sumptuous fern clutched in her hands and says, "Do you mind, again?" Her husband will not have it in the house, for whatever reason, and the days of safe harborage on their wraparound porch are numbered.

I take in the plant and it is mine until May, a good seven months. Mine to water and Miracle-Gro. But also mine to enjoy, to catch an appreciative glance at whenever I come down the stairs and pass through the living room to the kitchen.

I have often thought about how to regard this little babysitting job. Today I tended to its basic needs as usual on a Monday, something Barbara doesn't have to do. But neither does Barbara have the benefit of its lending a sense of God's great outdoors in the indoors. If Barbara were a crafty woman, she might have put the matter differently to me back in September, and offered to rent out her fern for feng shui-for a small fee. Who is doing whom the favor?

I started thinking not only the fern but of everything that I imagine I own-the house, the kids, the clothes on my back. All loans. And yet I do not ordinarily think to myself, as I have sometimes caught myself thinking about the fern: "I have to give it back."

One can have two different attitudes about the fern. If one dwells on the fact that come spring, Barbara will repossess it, one is covetous, like the stewards of the parable who came to think of the master's vineyard as their own, and in the end killed the returning son. Or one can take the view that it is pretty fortunate to be able to have a fern for a while, for free.

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