When I lived in St. Louis at various points in time I would go to a place called Shaw’s Coffee, particularly that summer or two I interned at an office down the street. They had beautiful blue ceramic cups if you were drinking in, and delicious dark roasted coffees. At some point I bought a mug, and it was my favorite mug, and at some point it developed a crack along one of its sides, and it became a mug for pens, loose change, other errata. My parents still sometimes send us Legos as a kind of throwback (my brothers and I, we played a lot of Legos), and some years ago they sent us a box labeled "Lego Botanicals," containing a pair of roses, which now live in the blue mug, forever blooming red, their stems forever a plastic green. Sometimes the kitten chews the side of one on her way to the windowsill, but mostly they sit far in the background of my work calls, away from the growing plants that live elsewhere in the house.

I visited a friend recently on the heels of a work trip and I noticed that he, too, had a Lego plant amongst his succulents and hanging plants, a beautiful little tree with red and pink blooms that to me looks vaguely Japanese. I didn’t ask him about it, but I feel like I should have: was this also a gift, sent to him by his mother? (I suppose I could text him, but that would ruin the fun.)

We are both, my friend and I, of an age where we can — and do — take care of real, living plants. So I’m not sure why we have plastic plants, too. A kind of decoration? An kind of aspiration for what things we might grow in the future (for I certainly cannot grow roses at this point in time)? Though it they are, indeed, a kind of admission of defeat to the petroleum world in which we live, I do not think that’s really what they signal, or at least: I can say that’s not what I think, at least at first, for myself.

I don’t really know what I think.

Nostalgia is certainly a part of it: a childhood toy now grown up. There’s certainly, too, a kind of naive appreciation for pretty, unchanging things. And. What was the most wonderful thing about my work trip was going to a place not still mired in its brutal winter (as Boston seems to be, or at least was when I left), the air wet and dewy with green things blooming or about to be, and I dreamed of my own spring soon — one hopes — to come, my own garden, my own few growing things at home and in the yard. Plastic only smells like plastic (not necessarily an unpleasing smell, but). Is the plastic rose then a talisman to get me through the winter?

No, it’s probably as simple as something I put together as something to do when I was too sick to do anything else, and perhaps that it is that. But I find it notable that — counting mine, my friend’s — it’s happened twice.

So I’ll return home, down the garden path, and make preparations for spring.