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This essay was originally published in Salon on March 21, 2020. We're revisiting Salon's Best Life Stories of 2020 now through the end of the year. Read more Best of 2020 here.
I write this from a rented cabin in rural Montana; it is February and the snow falls quietly, constantly. A hope philodendron stands in the window of the loft bedroom, the largest and healthiest I have ever seen in real life, almost five feet tall. The leaves are long, rippled hands grasping at an invisible sun, so enormous that they seem almost alien. The plant is beautiful, but it is more than that: its presence here in Montana, in the middle of winter, feels incongruous, inexplicable, and therefore magical. The hope philodendron, or