All my plants are diseased.

I've had most of them since I lived in Santa Cruz, when Eden and I would run houseplant rescue operations, buying up all the withered, anemic-looking pothos and philodendrons they sold in the back of the local Rite-Aid. Pretty soon every horizontal surface in the house was covered in potted positive chi, and our rooms looked more like greenhouses than crusty student rentals.

I took them to San Francisco, where the landlord almost kicked us out as soon as he saw me moving in with so many plants - he was terrified of water damage. The plants stayed, but I eventually left.

When I left San Francisco, I took cuttings from all my houseplants, wrapped them in wet paper towels and plastic, put them in a suitcase, and flew to Seattle. They lived in leftover milk bottles for three months until I found my own place, an apartment I picked almost solely because of its southern exposure. My plants loved the humidity and the sunlight. I even managed to cultivate a maidenhair fern, a species which even Eden had given up on as impossible to keep alive. I got a cat. He constantly chewed on the little palm that had sat in my bathroom in San Francisco. I went on a three month trip to Austin and most of my plants survived the chewing instincts of two cats and the sporadic watering of the housesitter.

Before I moved to LA, I made a separate trip in my car, with the cat on my lap - I couldn't see out the back window due to the sheer amount of foliage in the back seat. When I passed the agricultural checkpoint at the California border I promised, scout's honor, that my plants had never, ever been outside, and they waved me through, just as my cat chewed through the last remaining palm frond. The cat stayed at my parents' house. The plants came to LA.

I don't think they liked the climate change. My huge, 10 foot long, bushy pothos stopped making new leaves. The cuttings turned a sort of sickly yellow. A bush outside got an infestation of fuzzy white webbing and louse-like white bugs. We finally had to hose the whole thing down with Malathion to keep the bugs in check. Slowly, my indoor plants started dropping leaves, even though I got a skylight installed in the bathroom just so I could keep plants in the shower. Now most of my older plants are withered away, covered in that white fuzzy stuff. It doesn't seem to matter how often I water them or clean off their leaves with soapy water. Every week I cart another one out to the yard waste bin.

I don't have the heart to go out and buy new ones.