As they walked, the cool morning heated and more and more people appeared.

Greta kept to one street at first, thinking she’d follow it and see where she ended up. But things she absolutely had to see kept revealing themselves around corners and through intersections, and soon she just let her eyes guide her.

Horse, now off his normal route, seemed perfectly happy to walk by her side, a companion rather than a compass.

Greta breathed deeply of the lush plants she walked past, greenery-starved from the Maine winter. Here, ferns and myrtle curled fingers around each other and sunflowers stood tall. Jasmine scented the air, and the porch of a yellow-and-white house was crawling with passionflower. Orange trees grew in a corner lot, the fruit clinging cartoonishly to the trees like something out of a juice commercial. Greta couldn’t believe they actually grew like that. She imagined waking on a warm December morning and walking outside to pluck an orange from her own tree for breakfast. The prospect made her giddy.

Greta’s love affair with plants had happened slowly.

First she’d been given a spider plant as a gift, and she’d hung it in the window, not sure what else to do with it. When it began sending out arms with miniature versions of itself at the end of them, Greta had been amazed. To see something replicate itself, by itself, without any intervention…it made her think about plants in a completely different way.

Then came another plant and another. She followed Instagram accounts and watched YouTube videos, googled facts, and downloaded apps.

Succulents were her next obsession, and she would drive from garden store to garden store on the mainland, pluck fallen leaves out of the dirt and off the floor around the succulents, then take them home and watch them recreate themselves.

One afternoon trip to even a crappy garden center could yield pocketfuls of leaves. Before she knew it, she had dishes of sprouting succulent leaves on every windowsill of her house. She would check on them each morning, plucking them up to see the whiskery roots that had shot out in the night.

Sometimes they would sit dormant for weeks, and just when they would begin to shrivel and she would contemplate tossing them away, new life would emerge, feeding on the old growth. Self-vampiric, self-creating, they would birth themselves again and again, ad infinitum.

Greta admired them because they could do what she could not: be themselves, over and over, no compromises, no family.

Then winter came, and the weak Maine sun wasn’t enough. So then grow lights and reflectors and heat mats and more. Little by little, her home became a greenhouse. Became a sanctuary for the bits and pieces of plants she rescued and revered.