The heat hits you at the door — not warmth, real heat, the kind that makes your skin feel suddenly like it has weight. Outside it was eleven degrees. Inside, it is always August.
The smell reaches you before the temperature does: wet soil and chlorophyll and something almost animal, a ripe exhalation from things that grow whether you watch them or not. The door closes behind you and the cold disappears as though it was never the truth, just a rumor about someplace else. The windows are fogged from the inside. The snow pressing against the glass looks like a photograph of snow, flat and gray, unrelated to you.
A banana palm in January has no business being a banana palm in January. And yet. The leaves come out of the center stalk the way flags unfurl — slowly, greenly, with a seriousness of purpose. There are four or five unfurled already, each one wide enough to sleep under, each one a shade of green so definite it seems like an argument. The plant doesn’t know about January. It never learned. It goes on making itself in the only way it knows how, and the result is this: a banana palm in New England in winter, and if you stand next to it you feel like you’re getting away with something.
Down the path, a cactus that has been here since before anyone now living started coming here. This is a guess but it feels like a fact. It’s a saguaro, or something like one, and it fills its corner the way old furniture fills a room — not taking over, just occupying its exact amount of space with a finality that forecloses rearrangement. It is covered in the fine gray spines that look soft from a distance and are not. Someone tried to touch one once. You can imagine it even if no one told you.
The orchids are in a side room and people come specifically for them, but they’re not the thing worth looking at. Too theatrical. The thing worth looking at is a succulent the size of a dinner plate growing in a terra cotta pot on a shelf between a heating duct and a folding table. No tag. No ceremony. The leaves are the color of a bruise that is healing — blue-green at the center, reddish at the edges, each one flattened and slightly cupped like a hand holding a little water. It may not have been watered in two weeks. It may not need to be. It carries what it needs inside itself, in the swollen leaves, in the thick stem that doesn’t apologize for its thickness.
Outside the wind is doing something to the trees. You can’t hear it but you can see the trees moving and you know what that means. The sky has the white density of a sky deciding whether to snow. But in here the air is still and heavy and the banana palm is still doing what the banana palm does and the succulent is still holding its particular color and the smell of the soil is still the smell of the soil, which is to say: the smell of something growing, which is to say: the smell of something not stopping.
You stay longer than you planned. Everyone does.