“For me?” About a meaningful gift

My doorbell rang the morning of January 28, and I assumed it wouldn’t be a good thing. I wasn’t expecting a delivery, and spontaneous visitors frustrated me because they interrupted my deadline-based work. When I opened the door, a delivery person handed me a large money plant with a stylish bow.

I read the card that came with the plant. It was from the four colleagues who, along with me, had been working for 1.5 years plus on a style guide for our employer. The goal of the guide is to help employees of the company be as respectful and equitable as possible in the publications, websites and events the company produces.

The plant arrived shortly before our final meeting, which was taking place on my next-to-last day at work. I quickly dropped a picture of it into our team Slack and said, “Remind me to tell you why this is the perfect gift when we meet later today.”

A home office in need of a makeover

I have a great room for a home office. Over the two years I’ve been working out of it, though, I haven’t done much to improve it, and I have let stacks (and dust bunnies) multiply.

One small thing I promised myself I would do prior to starting my new job on February 1 was to get a plant. I really enjoy houseplants, but we had given up on having them once we realized that our cats considered them snacks.

However, Alice Cooper has gone on to kitty heaven, and she was worse about plants than Bella is. We tried going back to a live Christmas tree this year, and the idea didn’t turn into a disaster, so I had a hunch that we might be able to dip our toe into the plant owner life again.

About the committee

Before I talk about that last meeting, here’s a little bit of history about the committee. Big organizations are multi-committee’d places, and our employer was no exception. If you imagine a Russian nesting doll, you can envision the Style Guide Committee as the smallest doll nested under the Editorial Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which was nested under the Diversity forum.

When the five of us volunteered for this committee long, long ago in the autumn of 2020, we thought we would have a finished product by the end of that year. The guide was to cover how to write about gender, disabilities, neurodiversity, race and LGBTQ+ issues.

We weren’t done by the end of 2020. We weren’t done by the end of 2021. We weren’t done by January 28, 2022. Now the “we” has converted to “they,” but I have full faith that they will get it done, and it will help people make more effective writing choices.

Even though there wasn’t a finished product by the time I left, the people on this committee and the work we did will live on in my memory bank as incredibly meaningful. It turns out that when you put five people from different countries, of different races, from different places on the gender spectrum, of a wide range of ages onto a committee, those people learn a whole lot, about themselves and each other, when they try to figure out what “inclusive language” means.

There was so much candor and intellect in this group. They’re among the people I laughed with the most at work, and the only colleagues with whom I cried on video. They had my back; I had theirs … and they sent me a plant.

And the plant?

We had a great meeting that day. As the hour was nearing its end, someone asked, almost as an afterthought, “But why did you say the plant was the perfect gift?”

I explained that I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t follow through on my promise to myself, that I would put off the task of choosing something, that I would (shocker) overthink what to get, when to get it and where to put it. I definitely would have played it safe and gotten something small if I had gotten anything at all.

Therefore, when my doorbell rang and the delivery person handed me the money tree, and I read who it was from, then googled “money tree” and realized that they are easy to care for and nontoxic to cats, I knew that once again these people had my back.

Money trees are said by feng shui enthusiasts to attract wealth and good fortune. While I hope that is true as I embark on a new professional beginning, this gift reminds me that I am already wealthy in the ways that matter most.

This is a response to the Kat Bouska prompt “Tell us about the last nice thing somebody did for you.” Many people have done numerous nice things for me recently, so this isn’t *technically* the most recent, but it’s one of the most significant — just ask the cat.