My second favorite plant is peeking over the top of my laptop. Two leaves of a mustard green with white-gray spots tremble as I type, and their quiver intensifies as my word count per minute climbs past 60.
I haven’t mentioned my early typing days. In 5th grade—back in the age of dinosaurs, when computers weren’t housed in classrooms and laptops didn’t exist—we had unwired keyboards.
“Class, place your fingers on the home row and press down your left pinky finger. That is A. Now press A. Press it again.”
Mrs. Russell slowly, days later, would add S, D, F, and so on. Eventually, she draped a sheet over our hands, disallowing any peeks.
In 7th grade, I took a typing class with Mr. Le…something. He was a girl in my class’s dad and he challenged me to a race. He was fast. So was I. We went head-to-head in Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and I won. The nostalgia of that blue-screened program makes me as happy as Grandma’s Dutch apple pie or her homemade angel food cake. To gamify typing—to compete with myself to get faster—just does something for me.
That’s why I loved dealing poker all those years. The number of micro tasks inside a single hand thrilled me: shuffle, pitch, read, rake, repeat. My mind was constantly rearranging the process to find what was more efficient, more perfected. I have such positive feelings about this skill because I’ve seen where it leads: mastery.
I am not yet a master baker, but I’m on my way. Fermentation is my current quest. With Spanish, it’s choosing the right tense and collecting new words like treasures. Caballo is horse—as everyone knows—but caballa is mackerel. When will I ever use that word outside of this sentence? Likely never. But it’s mine now.
My first favorite plant is staring me down from the kitchen countertop, a few inches above this table. Its true home is in front of the fireplace, but with tonight’s first fire of the season blazing, Dave carried it in here, worried about its drooping leaves. I’m not concerned, but seeing its magnificent foliage—dark green with lime veins down its center, spreading toward the edges like a rib cage—I know what it really wants is a larger, more beautiful pot. The expensive organic potting soil waits in the garage. What I don’t have is the pot. And pots cost money when they’re new. I haven’t yet looked secondhand—Goodwill or Facebook Marketplace—but I’ll start there.
Mastery always begins with something too small.
A keyboard with no screen. A Mavis Beacon race. A single Spanish word. A pot-bound plant.
And then, slowly—keystroke by keystroke, leaf by leaf—we grow into more room.
Thanks for being here! Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 