When I was a kid my maternal grandparents, whom I loved very much, moved to southern Louisiana. We went to visit them and brought home a big cactus, several feet tall, to St. Louis. My mom planted the cactus in the yard, but it didn't make it. I remember it tall and stately, impossibly spiny in the humid Missouri summer. Then the feeling of knowing it wasn't coming back, disbelief, a fallen monument.

A few years later, my grandma died and within the year, my grandpa. We went to Grandma's funeral and Grandpa hugged me tighter than I understood at the time. He wasn't my mom's dad; Grandma had married him when my mom was an adult. Mom never liked him. But he was the only grandpa I knew. I was the granddaughter. That is how I understand it now.

Their trailers, I remember two different ones, sat on sandy lots with cactus and other dry-land oddities nearby. Every time we left, Grandma tried to send us home with the things she wanted us to inherit, but Dad wouldn't let Mom rent a trailer and we already had four people in the car and there wasn't room for much. Now I have a Depression-glass pitcher with glasses, a blue tin container with a hinged lid decorated with cats, and a white planter in the shape of a cat. I don't remember what else I might have had.

Every cactus I had in college died. When I met my husband, Eric, he declared himself into cactuses and we acquired several. Only one survived. 

We didn't go to Grandpa's funeral. Dad had the flu and it was a long drive and not my decision.

Now we have a couple cactuses, one from cuttings of a cactus of my mom's and another I managed to save from Eric's cactus days. I care for them and they do okay. The thing is, once a cactus begins to go, I don't think there's much you can do to save it. So I do as little as I can and hope they survive. This approach seems to work, but I wonder if I got this idea from my parents, and if I should know better.

Part of me still believes there must be a way to save a cactus, to make the trip, to make something last forever.