Some people are best described as God’s Houseplants.
They are granted a life within a confined existence, viewing the world from His windowsill. While they cannot frolic freely among the wildflowers, they dance in the breeze, hold their roots together, reach for the sky, and bloom into beauty.
I have spent a good portion of my life wondering which category I fall into.
My name is Cindy Peterson, and I have been, save a few short days, a lifetime orphan. I am a “60-something” woman who grew up bouncing between foster homes, joined the Army at 18, became a Physician Assistant, grew disillusioned with what I eventually started calling “Health Scare and Repair,” and landed, somehow, at a healthcare analytics desk in Sanford, Florida. I manage data. I count things. I find comfort in numbers because numbers, unlike people, do not disappear without warning or change their stories depending on the day.
I still dream of Prince Charming, which I fully acknowledge is an embarrassing admission for a woman of my age and clinical background. But some fairytales are stubborn things, and I have yet to find a treatment for optimism.
What I have found is a free clinic just west of DeLand, Florida.
I volunteer there on weekends, roped in, if I’m being honest, by my extraordinary friend and colleague, Dr. Antonio Peterson. Antonio is a physician who lives for, with, and among those the rest of the healthcare system has largely decided not to bother with. He heals souls. He communicates in compassion. He wore polka dot shorts held up with a piece of twine the first time I met him, which should tell you everything you need to know about the man.
The clinic operates on what I can only describe as organized optimism. We have gloves, dressings, a few sutures, a thermometer, and a bulletin board near the entrance with handwritten quotes pinned to it. Medications are minimal to nonexistent. The lollipops, however, are generously stocked.
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do it. I wasn’t sure I could walk into a place with such an impossible gap between what is needed and what is available and not simply be consumed by the distance between the two. I have seen real healthcare. I know what it can be when resources exist. Showing up somewhere that runs on heart and very little else felt, at first, like an exercise in beautiful futility.
But then I noticed the bulletin board.
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It is not.” — Dr. Seuss
“When the WHY is important enough, the HOW becomes easy.”
“We can do no great things. But we can do small things with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.” — Mother Teresa
I stood in front of that bulletin board for longer than I should admit.
I am amazed, week after week, at how well people with almost nothing care for others who have even less. I watch parents in this clinic — barely holding their own lives together — go to extraordinary lengths for their children. I watch elderly patients apologize for taking up our time. I watch Antonio move through that space like a man who has never once doubted that what he is doing matters, because it does.
I am a woman of science. I believe in evidence. I believe in data and outcomes and measurable results. And yet, standing in that clinic, I keep running into something the spreadsheets cannot account for, the particular and stubborn power of showing up for people who have been told, repeatedly, not to expect anyone to show up.
Perhaps that is what it means to bloom from the windowsill.
I’m beginning to think I am going to like this place after all.
Cindy Peterson is a character from the award-winning novels Beyond the Garden – God’s Houseplants and Sophie’s Wildflowers by Sahara Sutter. Both books earned the Literary Titan Award. Available on Amazon and in bookstores worldwide.
