Lessons from my Covid Orchid

My orchid plant on March 14, 2021, the first time it re-bloomed.

My Covid orchid will re-bloom for the fifth time in about two weeks, right on schedule. A friend gifted it to me in June of 2020 when we were finally able to see each other again after months of avoiding public transportation and other people, in general. I’d never successfully kept an orchid alive long enough to experience its re-bloom but in 2020 I did. I remembered what I’d learned working in a flower shop in Chicago in the early aughts: when the last of an orchid’s blooms have fallen, cut the stem down to just above the second node and continue watering it and caring for it the same as you would while it’s flowering. Then maybe, if you’re lucky and the conditions have been favorable, you can expect to see new blooms in 8-12 months.

Honestly, it wasn’t a hassle I would have typically taken on. With a husband, two kids under nine, an elderly diabetic cat who needed insulin shots every 12 hours, plenty of other plants, and a house with a roof that hadn’t stopped leaking since we bought the place over two years and four roofers earlier, I had enough to nurture and worry over. But in quarantine, what else was there to do but water our gardens and watch them grow? And so I did.

After the final blooms dropped in early fall of 2020 and my daughter began learning how to read on Zoom, I cut the orchid stem down to just above its second node. Joanie sounded out the letters she’d written on her dry erase board and I watered the orchid twice a week, the same as when it was in bloom. I wanted and waited for three things in those days: for Biden to win the election; mass vaccination; and for my orchid plant to flower again. If these three things could happen, maybe we would be OK.

I have a video I took on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn on November 7, 2020, when the election was called for Biden, and every few months I like to watch it to remember that specific feeling of jubilance and relief and exhaustion during an extended period of stress and loss and fear. There’s probably a German word for it. I felt it when I got vaccinated too, but that was mostly a solo sensation instead of the collective jubilation we felt on “Joe Biden Day,” as Drew calls it.

I was walking along Prospect Park West with a friend, on the way to the farmers market the moment we learned about the win. If you remember, it had been four very long and tense days since the election and the air was both heavy and electric with nervous anticipation. If someone even whistled in my direction, I think I would’ve jumped three feet in the air, that’s how sensitive my antenna was.

It wasn’t a whistle but a whoop and I heard it from someone’s window in one of the mid-rise apartment buildings that line the boulevard. It may have even been Chuck Schumer’s building where I’d protested at least three times during Trump’s first term, urging Schumer not to give him an inch. I heard the whoop and immediately knew. “Biden won!” I exclaimed, turning to my friend I’d known since our kids were babies. We hugged tightly, tears running down our faces, as the whoops and hollers and honking and cheers exploded around us.

If you’ve ever been to the farmers market at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn or you’re familiar with the demographics of the area – there are a lot of folks carrying New Yorker totes – it won’t surprise you to hear that the crowd was more than a little excited to learn that Trump lost. Back on Vanderbilt Avenue, we enjoyed an impromptu block party that went well into the evening, popping the good champagne, ordering sushi from down the street, blasting music, some brass bands came out and played, even Schumer stopped to say hello on what I guess he thought was a victory lap. It was the first taste of hope for so many of us after months of despair in New York City.

A few months later, during the first anniversary of the lockdown, my Covid orchid bloomed again. I’d watered it faithfully and kept it in a sunny spot, and about four months after I’d cut down the stem, it formed a little spike and began growing. It grew so slowly, I couldn’t be certain I was truly seeing anything until a few weeks later when a third node formed and then a fourth and finally, a fifth, and then four tight buds, each promising the hope of brighter days as they unfurled and stretched – their soft yellow-ish green petals expanding like wings. Maybe we’d make it after all.

The other day my son said to me: “My high school graduation is closer now than the start of Covid is,” and I did the quick calculation in my head and realized that he was right. It shouldn’t have surprised me – the years have passed and I was there for them all, watering the plants and watching them grow, nurturing my children and watching them grow. But still, five years? Shouldn’t there be some kind of collective…. I don’t know… something to acknowledge this?

I wasn’t here in New York for 9/11, but I’ve been here for 17 of the anniversaries that have followed and there is always something, as there should be. There’s a moving museum, memorial lights, and a whole ceremony every year that thousands of people attend to pay tribute to those who lost their lives that day. But as a city – as a country – we do nothing to honor those we lost to Covid and the essential workers who kept things running. It happened. It changed our culture, the trajectory of our politics, our economy, and the soul of our nation. It changed me, and I bet it changed you, too.

Next week will mark five years since the city and the world began shutting down. Five years since the first public school educator – a teacher at our neighborhood school where my kids were students – died of Covid, after her third-graders watched her get sicker and sicker on Zoom over the course of a week. Five years since the unrelenting sirens and the morgue trucks and the 7 PM applause for healthcare workers. Five years since we bought all the N95 masks and disinfected our groceries and stayed six feet away from each other. Five years since so many of us said good-bye to loved ones over FaceTime and wondered who might be next.

In 2023, just a few weeks shy of his 18th birthday, our diabetic cat, Miles, died in my arms and broke my heart. The following spring, after seven years and seven teams of workers, our roof finally stopped leaking every time it rains. My daughter who learned to read on Zoom is in fourth grade now and gobbles graphic novels by the dozens. And my son, nearly 5’11” and closer to college than he is to the beginning of the pandemic, has grown almost a foot and a half over these past five years, and towers over me as he asks what’s for dinner.

In March 2025, weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, there’s a familiar sense of doom I recognize from five years earlier. Fascism is a different virus but it’s consequences are just as dire. I could let myself get lost in hopelessness and despair, but I won’t. In about two weeks, my orchid plant will re-bloom again, right on time. Right now, there are four teeny, tight buds and soon they will unfurl and stretch, their yellowish-green petals expanding like wings. And when the last one falls, a few months from now, I will keep watering and waiting. I’ve seen enough to know it will re-bloom again.