Aloe

We awoke on Thursday morning to find a huge aloe plant on the floor in my office, along with the dirt in which it had been planted. It had stood in a pot on top of a bookshelf where my wife stores books and sheets of printed music. The top of the shelf unit is just about flush with a window between my office and the kitchen, just above the kitchen sink. There is a sliding glass pane in this window, because the inside wall of my office was once the outside wall of the house.

I had removed the aloe plant from the window sill next to my desk because it had been extending its succulent green arms much too widely to be contained there much longer. My wife planted it in a bigger pot and put it on the wider shelf unit. Then we more or less forgot about it.

But the arms, it seems, continued to grow. Mostly I don’t look at the plant in the pot, and if I do, it appears to just sit there. But it was moving – slowly and steadily, toward the edge of the shelf. There was no loud crash when it fell down in the middle of the night. Perhaps those arms acted as a braking and silencing device worthy of NASA Mars probe engineers, I don’t know.

How long had it been on the brink, I wonder, adding a cell at a time to those arms, pushing it away from the window, toward the tipping point? Seemingly inert, its rate of expansion was nevertheless closer to the pace of spilled milk seeping across the table than that of a shotgun pellet on its way to a clay pigeon. But seen from the vantage point of the speed of light, even a bullet seems positively pokey.

Yet the aloe arms changed the landscape, as it were, in a matter of months – breakneck speed compared to the carving of valleys by glaciers or the congealing of planetary systems out of dust clouds in the arms of a galaxy.

We live in a universe in constant motion, where uncountable changes occur in time spans too short to imagine, and where seemingly unchangeable objects are dancing and swirling, rising and falling in time frames beyond our comprehension. There are constantly things going on around us that we cannot see. Until, suddenly, we do.

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