KayLynn is currently working on a project about her parents and family and the home they have shared for 52 years.

The Half-Century PlantMy dad was a mechanical engineer at Sandia National Labs for almost 40 years. This plastic rubber tree plant sat in the office he shared with others until it was no longer wanted and he offered to take it home. As children my b…

The Half-Century Plant

This is a love story about a plastic plant.

It starts in the Atomic Age – 1957 – when my father hired on as a mechanical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories. Sometime in dad’s first ten years at Sandia he shared an office with a bunch of other engineers and secretaries and they had a fake rubber tree in that office where they collectively used math to protect the nation. One day it was decided that the rubber rubber tree had done its time and it needed to go and they asked around to see if anyone wanted it. My dad, always up for a bargain, accepted. He took it home and the rubber rubber tree has now lived with my parents for 50 plus years. It’s in their house today, in the den.

The rubber rubber tree plant was a fixture in the den before my little brother James and I were on the scene, but we took over that room upon our arrival and ricocheted off just about everything in there. We were always playing around the “plant” and knocking leaves off that even a mechanical engineer with an affinity for good adhesives couldn’t reattach. (I seem to remember Mom costing it leaves cleaning it too. Not that I’m pointing any fingers.) Anyway, over time, the rubber tree was wounded in action and thinned out a lot, but James and I finally grew up and calmed the hell down and saved its skinny life before it was too late.

In 2017, my husband, Will, and I moved in with mom and dad, by then in their 80’s, to help them out. One day I was standing in the garage in front of the washing machine zoning out and waiting for the tub to fill. I looked up to a high shelf and saw little slivers of green. I wondered. And then I thought, “They couldn’t be the flipping leaves we knocked off the plant.” I climbed up there to see and ... they were. 15 of them, spooning on that high shelf. Mom saved them there. 

Our garage contains our entire universe. It’s all there, Deveney guts, feathers and all. Even the fallen leaves of a half-century old plastic plant are there, casualties of our joy and cleanliness.