I just want to be like my late great-grandma.
I want a kajillion plants in my home—and the daily ritual of misting them with love and water. I imagine myself standing by the window, breathing with them, exhaling the carbon dioxide they drink up like fuel. Naturally, my house is already full of plantitas (little plants).
On a family trip to Orlando, I spotted a kiosk selling plumeria cuttings. The setup was charming, and the scent? Downright intoxicating. I wanted that.
The woman working there—rocking an Animal Crossing button-up I secretly coveted—kindly explained how the cuttings worked. The whole encounter felt divinely timed, like I was meant to be there.
Without hesitation, I spent $15 on a plumeria cutting. No leaves and about ten inches tall shaped like a lowercase “y.”
When we returned home, I don’t even think I unpacked before asking my husband to take me to Home Depot. The instructions called for sand, so I picked out a vase and a bag of play sand, put it all together, and placed it in the perfect sunny spot in the backyard. The vase was too heavy for my usual plant stand, so it sat on the ground—which, looking back, probably should’ve been my first red flag.
Weeks went by… and nothing.
No leaves. No change. Just a very expensive stick.
I video chatted with my mom daily, showing her “the stick,” and we’d laugh about how I might’ve been scammed. “What a genius business model,” my husband joked. “Cut random branches, call them magic, and sell them for $20 a pop.”
But I believed it was real. I may not be a plant expert, but I know patience is part of the deal.
And while I waited, I dreamed.
I pictured it growing tall and tree-like, bursting with heavenly blooms I could share. I imagined giving away my own cuttings someday, filling my home with its sweet fragrance—maybe even tucking a flower behind my ear.
And then—disaster.
After a long phone meeting with my boss, I stepped outside to recharge with my plantitas.
But my plumeria cutting was gone. The vase was there. The sand was there. But no stick.
Vanished from the vase.
Confused, I asked my daughter to check deeper into the yard since I wasn’t wearing shoes. She wandered a little, then turned to me, holding what looked like a soggy rock, her face full of dread.
“IS THAT MY STICK?!” I asked, already knowing.
She nodded solemnly.
My dog, Violet—an energetic Weimshepherd with the heart of a toddler—had kidnapped and destroyed my plumeria cutting.
I should’ve known. Dog + Stick = Me, the fool.
Then, in a sweet act of solidarity, my son found the largest remaining piece of soggy rock and gently stuck it back into the sand. “We gotta do what we can for Mama,” he declared.
And the disappointment hit harder than I expected.
I grieved the whole dream—the flowers, the before-and-after pics, the simple joy of watching something grow. “Kenia, grow up,” I told myself.
But honestly? It stung.
Why did I feel the need to brush it off so quickly? Why minimize a small desire like the hope of a fully grown plumeria? The truth is, that impulse to minimize comes from a place of not having enough emotional space to carry another disappointment. I was already carrying the load of so many different headlining disappointments—I couldn’t bear to carry another. And if I absolutely had to, it certainly wasn’t going to be about a plant.
We tell ourselves it’s silly to care about the little heartaches, but isn’t that precisely why we hope in the first place?
I thought about ordering another one, but now the shop’s online prices were higher because of shipping. With all the things the kids needed that month, I couldn’t justify it. So… I let it go.
But maybe that’s the thing about dreams—even the small ones. I may have lost one little plumeria stick, but the idea of having a plumeria never really left me. It wasn’t gone. It was waiting to come back in a better, more poetic way. I just didn’t know the story wasn’t over yet.
Hope Shut Down
Then came May—graduation season.
At a friend’s party, I spotted a floral centerpiece overflowing with plumeria blooms. I walked over, took in the scent, and instantly recognized it. A woman nearby shouted, “They smell so good, right?!”
I nodded. “Are these plumeria flowers?”
A couple at the table confirmed it was, and I casually shared my plumeria tragedy. To my surprise, they told me the flowers came from their backyard.
I was genuinely happy for them. I thought, If God can bless them with flowers, He can bless me too.
As I was getting ready to leave, the wife approached me.
“If you want,” she said, “I can give you some of my plumeria cuttings to take home.”
I wanted to cry. But I kept it together and thanked her, trying not to be weird.
“A lot of people have given me seeds and plants,” she said. “I figure I can do the same.”
We walked to her house. And when we stepped into her backyard—jaw. drop.
Plumerias everywhere. Not just a few in pots—a full-blown plumeria paradise.
She asked which color I wanted.
“Color?!” I gasped. I didn’t even know I had options.
She started cutting. I expected another little ten-inch stick. But no. She handed me a tree-sized cutting—multiple branches, actual flowers.
Then she asked, “Do you want another one?”
Me: “ANOTHER?!”
She smiled and cut a second. Honestly, call me the Plumeria Queen at this point.
I thanked her a quintillion times and headed to the car, still in shock.
My daughter—the same one who witnessed the original tragedy—was speechless. She recognized the cuttings right away and was so happy for me. The woman even offered me more, but our car was packed. I politely declined.
Still, I drove home overflowing with gratitude.
And on that drive, I couldn’t stop thinking about God. How He saw my tiny, unspoken disappointment—the desire for a beautiful thing I loved. How He let me grieve something small and silly—and then turned around and blessed me with more than I had space for.
“See if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.” — Malachi 3:10
If God is that present in the small heartaches… imagine how near He is in the big ones.
When I got home, I planted those glorious cuttings straight into the sand.
What a story, right?
…Until I noticed the leaves wilting.
Of course. Why are the leaves always wilting on me? Perhaps I’m not the Plant Queen after all. Maybe I’m the Plant Court Jester—here for comic relief in the garden of life.
Lying Dormant
I am adding this part of the story a few months after I finished writing this book. I absolutely needed to include this before publishing.
The leaves were wilting because I didn’t understand the callousing process at the time. I placed the large cuttings into dirt expecting a miracle, but any plant enthusiast would know immediately that my plumeria cuttings were destined to die based on how I handled them.
I did some research and completely removed all the leaves and flowers from the sticks, as instructed via YouTube. After letting the cuttings callous outside for about a week or two, I placed them back into the sand.
More waiting. I saw no progress. Instead, I noticed the base of one of the cuttings turn black and soggy. Yes, one of my branches rotted from the inside. It was so rotted, I tried to cut off the rot and expose good “meat” inside, but it was rotten all the way through. I threw my dream into the garbage.
This can’t be! I said. God arranged my meeting with that woman because He was gifting me some plumerias and showing me that He loves me. They can’t die. This makes no sense.
I gathered some hope from the last cutting I had. This was the one with three branches—the shape I dreamed of having.
I followed all the steps and noticed some flowers growing, yet the stick itself was shriveled. What is going on?! I was frustrated and confused. Is this branch dying or thriving? Sure enough, after a few days, the flowers that fought through completely died.
I pulled the stick out of the dirt in frustration and cut the bottom of the branch to start all over. I let it callous even longer, and once I felt it was dried to the max, I placed it back into cactus dirt instead of sand this time. For weeks, all I saw was a shriveled stick with its original tiny leaves falling off one by one. I would walk out my door and see it sitting there with no special changes, just getting more shriveled like a raisin.
Finally, I gave it a drop of water, got eye level with the wrinkly branch, and said, “God, you have to do something.” The symbol of my hopes and dreams boiled down to a sad branch withering away little by little. I kept believing something had to happen.
A little later in the day, I walked to the front of my home to check on the landscape. I often inspect the flowers and plants to see if something new is happening. For months I noticed these dead branches—taller than me—that were planted in front of our home before we moved in and they needed to be removed. I texted my good friend Elaine who is also the owner of the home if she was ok with me pulling the dead branches out. She was reluctant at first because she thought “they just need more water”. She wasnt sure what type of plant/tree/bush we were dealing with so she wanted to give it another chance. I agreed.
Naturally, after more time had passed, the branches were not improving so Elaine finally agreed to pull them out.
I looked at the dead branches to see where I should pull from to get it out all at once until I noticed new leaves growing all over the base. Leaves that were never there before. Growth coming up right next to each dead branch. Interesting, I said. When did this start growing?
I looked at something budding from one of the new branches and immediately realized the structure. My heart started racing. What is this?! It cannot be. I did a reverse image lookup, and sure enough, the green growing where the dead branches stood was plumeria.
The excitement was something I cannot explain. Mouth gaping, tears forming, breath stopping. God knew all along what was lying dormant underground in the front of my house. There were two sections in the front of the house with the dead branches—an eyesore. Large, dead branches. No life. You touch the branch and it would crumble. What was exposed to the world was a disguise. The roots had secrets to tell.
And for more than a year, it kept hidden that it was a plumeria waiting to make its appearance. This whole time, what I thought was a dead dream was lying dormant, waiting for the right time. God is so present to our desires—to our pain and prayers. He does exceedingly and abundantly, more than what we can ever imagine.
My plumeria story will be in my heart forever. What I thought I couldn’t have revealed itself at the right time and screamed, “You had it all along.”
AuthKG 