nursery

Some days, when I’m standing in the kitchen, gripping the edge of the counter and counting to ten, gritting my teeth and trying not to cry, there’s a place I remember. I suppose it’s sort of a mental shutoff for times when my mind’s in a panic. When I remember this place, I’m suddenly happier. The children are still screaming, the house is still dirty, but my fingers relax, my jaws relax, and a half-smile creeps across my face. I’m still here, in the kitchen, but I’m also far away, in one of the most beautiful places I’ve known.

Just off the highway between Franklin and Sylva, NC, nestled over in a green valley of the rolling Appalachian mountains, there’s a nursery and garden center run by several generations of the same family. The summer after my freshman year of college, fed up with waitressing and wanting something a little more “in my line”, I applied for a job during the busy season. Because I began work there in mid-spring, there was no time for silly training of any sort. My hands were needed. Now. I was taken to a plastic-covered hoop greenhouse full of vegetable plants and told to get to work.

So I organized the hodgepodge of vegetable plants into orderly rows, explained what I knew about them to customers (all based on one year’s coursework on a horticulture degree), and started to get my hands dirty. I found my hose, my potting table, my garden wagon, and began to make “greenhouse 9” mine. Over the ensuing weeks, I discovered that I, a 19-year-old horticulture student, was in charge of an entire portion of the nursery’s assets. I was the sole manager of a whole greenhouse full of vegetable plants. It was an absolute dream come true.

Every morning, I would step out of my parents’ car into the gravel parking lot. The valley would still be half-dark, the sun not yet peeping over the mountains. The mist would hang low around the tall pine trees, the air would be cool and wet. I’d close the car door, put on my straw hat, and weave the hat’s red ribbon into my thick braided hair. I’d clock in, put on my gloves, and go straight to my greenhouse.

A greenhouse full of healthy, growing plants is like a different world. Every morning when I opened up the door and went into greenhouse 9, the air was so heavy, cool and wet. It smelled so rich, like tomato plants, like growth. Like life. In the early morning quiet, the only sound would be the crunch of my tennis shoes on the gravel paths as I unwound my hose and began the long task of watering. As I worked, I began to feel somehow connected to the hundreds of plants in my greenhouse. They were not, perhaps, animate beings, but creatures with a life, nonetheless. I was led to wonder, in the long silent hours I spent with them, how much they…felt? Knew? How much life, exactly, is imbued in a 6-inch tall plant, living in a 1-inch square cell pack? I didn’t know, but I wondered at myself, feeling so thrilled when plants would go out the front door of my ‘house, to be planted in someone’s garden, and so distraught when they went out the back.

Vegetable season waned, and my employers found other tasks for me. I have images of myself from that summer like a scrapbook in my mind. Mucking out and dividing the pond plants, up to my elbows in black mud. Crouching behind a huge Japanese maple, daydreaming and filling up its gargantuan pot with water. Slowly traversing the length of a greenhouse full of flowering perennials, hose in hand, humming a fragment of a song.

The summer days grew long, and I found myself in a greenhouse that had been stripped of its plastic, leaving only its bare PVC ribs white against the sky. I sat on an upturned pot, a straw-hatted speck in an ocean of riotous full-blown roses. The day was so hot, I streamed with sweat as I worked, and I began to think of the long Utah winter I’d be returning to later that year. I carefully gathered up the heat, the heady scent of the flowers, the colors of the roses, the pines, the sky, and put them in my mental pocket, tucked away for perusal on some bleak snowy day. Little idea I had then of how many times that memory would warm me.

At the end of the days spent sweating in the sun, I’d drive back over the mountains, roll down the windows and drink in the smell of the wild honeysuckle that was everywhere. I’d go home, sweaty and exhausted, to shower and enjoy the deep sleep that comes of hard work and few responsibilities.

Now I work in a different kind of nursery. The days are longer, the work is more mentally demanding, and my charges would make a lot more noise before they withered away and died from my neglect. I know that I’m supposed to say that the job of wife and mother is more fulfilling, more important work, and so on. And perhaps it is. But when that job gets too tough, I think of another time, another job, where the work was so perfect for the person I really am.

Sometimes I think that when I die, I would be completely happy to find myself on the other side, standing in the gravel parking lot in the cool misty morning, tying on my straw hat. I’ll pull on my old gardening gloves and go open the door of that quiet, cool greenhouse. I'll unwind the hose, set the nozzle to a gentle spray, and get to work.

Come visit me there sometime, won't you, from wherever heaven is for you?