Several years ago a friend and  neighbor gave me a potted plant he no longer wanted. I adopted it as if it had been mine all along.

It’s a spindly, palm-like creature, with sprouts that shoot up to reveal a collection of horizontally-oriented fronds. This dear, quirky plant sheds in installments: for months at a time, the effusion of green atop each stem will be universally verdant. Then, as if on cue, the lowermost fronds of each tuft start to brown, then fall from the stem altogether. At the same time, though far less visibly, the stem itself gains a half-inch or so, and the shoots continue their upward journey.

Ironically, it is in their dying that the lower fronds reveal how truly healthy the whole plant is.