Melanie was prepared to take care of her new house plants, but she never thought that they would return the favour. By the time she entered her late thirties, she had never owned a single plant. The last bit of the decade had involved tireless hours working as she saved up enough money to follow her dream: designing and building a new home.
With the amount of time she spent in the office, any plant that she had considered buying to liven up her space had only seemed like a waste of money. If she wasn’t ever home, why would she need to decorate? The thing would only perish in a week or two, she’d always convinced herself.
It wasn’t until her dream was realised and she was standing in the corridor of her modern, newly furnished two-storey home that she found the place a bit… empty. It was beautiful, which was what she had expected. After all, she had hired the best luxury custom home builders for new houses Mornington Peninsula residents recommend. They had done their job well.
After all of the years of dreaming, she wanted it to feel like home. With the abundance of sunlight provided by the skylights the developers had installed, plants seemed like the best and only remaining improvement her property needed. She figured it would help her distinguish her home from the hundreds of new buildings brought on by her suburb’s rising residential property development (Melbourne was in a rapid state of growth this year).
She wanted a variety of houseplants to fill up her walls as living art. With a browse of some interior design catalogues, she had picked up a variety of small and large plants by the end of the week. It took three whole days to architect the perfect design for each of them, and it proved to be hard work. The night after repotting and settling them into their new homes, she went to sleep tired and hungry but with a smile.
That smile quickly faded the next morning. The plants had been adjusted overnight, their perfectly positioned pots slightly shuffled on the ground. Panic set in. As she ran to her phone she’d forgotten in the kitchen overnight, her thumb froze over the emergency call button. Something had stopped her dead in her tracks. She put her phone down and gaped, unsure of what to think of the fresh stack of pancakes sitting on the kitchen counter next to a lovely little, soiled-stained note that read:
“Thank you for the new home.”