My neighbor Genevieve

I'm getting ready to make some grilled cheese for Toby and me for lunch when someone knocks on my back door. An old lady with a red plaid shirt, and gray hair held in dangly coils with bobby pins stood in my back porch and introduced herself as Genevieve. Genevieve lives in one of the other buildings and had noticed that I liked plants (she pointed to my screen porch, where I have a couple two-foot-high rubber trees, and a spider plant on a plant stand). She has a number of plants on her porch and was going to be getting rid of some of them soon, and would I like some? I realized I wasn't sure which unit she lived in, so I offered to walk outside with her so she could show me. We walk across the parking lot and she points out a number of pots of soil she has stashed in the grass next to her porch. "I know when you move into a new place you never have pots, you never have good soil," she explains. "Would you like some of these? Here, this is good soil in this one." So she gives me a pot with soil in it, and a variegated ivy on a plastic hanger that she didn't want anymore. Then she asks if I want a cutting from an orchid she has inside. Obviously the answer is yes, so I follow her into her apartment and through to her screen porch where she just snaps a piece of stem off of a plant and hands it to me. "You don't have to root this at all, you just moisten the soil and put it in and it will flower in...around February."

Score. So I've got a variegated ivy, a cutting from some kind of orchid that looks like a cross between a begonia and a Wandering Jew, and she promised she'd let me know when she was ready to get rid of some more plants. She is 82, apparently, and from Paris. She studied at the Sorbonne. And she's living on her own with a screen porch full of bonsai, begonias and astroturf. And just happened to notice I had some plants on my porch.

I have located my camera charger. It's in Delaware. Once I repossess it, I'll be able to take some pictures of things again. Like my new (old) bike.