I. Writings from the Edge of the Apocalypse

I don’t know why I continue to be surprised. About anything.

March 20, 2020, day three at my new job.

Fresh air and sun: check

Creating something beautiful: check.

Getting paid to exercise: check.

Distracted from COVID-19: priceless.

What a relief it is to be inside the snow globe called The Garden Center. With its contained environment of self-directed, outwardly calm and friendly introverts, it is a world unto itself. I’d forgotten about COVID-19 and it wasn’t until I was in my car driving home on Saturday that I remembered. Oh yeah, Rome is burning.

I had spent the two days before managing the sudden closure of the building where the Taj, my yoga studio, is housed, and from which I was in the process of retiring. Our building contains a preschool as well as various physical arts, and the landlord, who also runs the school, precipitously closed the entire building for a minimum of two weeks. I had 12 hours to handle this bomb which included notifying my teachers they could not get into the building to earn a living. I can’t remember the last time I worked so hard to not make money.

My new retirement job at the nursery offers a striking level of autonomy: look around and take care of what needs to be taken care of. Major topics include:

Organizing existing tables. “Fronting” and “facing,” which translates to move all product forward on the tables and make sure the labels are facing forward. It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as you’re done, it’s time to start over.

Helping customers. A fabulous rubber-meets-the-road kind of way to help you understand you know nothing about plants.

Stocking. I was warned repeatedly, and the warnings were not overrated, that this is a physically demanding job. Lifting flats of plants that have been weighed down with water from a height of 4-6 feet takes some strength, as does squatting down to fetch them. Stamina is required as the trucks roll in, the product rolls out, and we ferry the flats of plants to tables to put them in their proper places. I thought I had me some arms from yoga. Ha! I’ll have biceps of the gods in a few weeks.

Which takes me to the most fatiguing aspect of the job that went unmentioned during my interview. The intellectual demands of alphabetizing a 36,000 square foot greenhouse full of hundreds of plants. Unless it’s a vegetable or herb, e v e r y t h i n g is arranged in alphabetical order according to its botanical name which is in Latin: It’s very hard to pronounce and spell the name of a plant if you’ve never heard it said.

Tags generally list in order the genus, species, and then the cultivar name:

genus = Japanese Forest Grass

species = Hakonechloa macra

cultivar = All Gold

Although there are three names needed to fully identify any given plant, many only know the genus, which in the nursery gets you to the right table. But plants are further sorted by their botanical name as well as their cultivar name. It’s also good to know there is a grid superimposed over the greenhouse and plants are arranged by perennial or annuals, shade or sun-loving. And just for fun, some plants bat for both sides: violas are both an annual and a perennial, as are primroses.

This doesn’t include the nursery, which is another department located just out the sliding glass doors of the greenhouse. Like Bali Ha’i, it beckons to you, where seemingly every rose, hydrangea and Japanese Maple known to humanity is waiting to be found.

The transition from studio Head Honcho to one of many nursery workers has required a certain level of awareness and self-discipline on my part. I’ve been running my own show for 30 years and although this is an oxymoron, I’m a reluctant alpha. This is good news as I have no problem taking direction, and I love not being in charge when I’m working with competent people, which I am. Where I have to be careful in this job, and this comes from years of teaching public classes as well as teaching teachers, is in setting the tone for interactions.

Case in point. I am a major goof-ball and I gave it almost free reign in my classroom. 20 years ago I recognized that planet yoga had the propensity to take itself way too seriously, and that if I was going to continue teaching, I had to let my inner Robin Williams out. I had to constantly reminded myself that students didn’t come to be entertained by a stand-up comedian, because lord howdy, Planet Yoga gave me a lot of material to work with.

I now represent someone else’s business and have come into an established community. I’m watching to see what the tenor is here, and I’d say good natured is an apt description. But good natured isn’t the same as goof-ball, or full blown joker; oh, no no no no it is not. I’m having to monitor myself, always looking for those lines. Like yesterday.

We have this groovy gizmo we call the Zamboni. It looks just like the one you see at ice rinks only much smaller. It’s the cool-kid-job done after we have swept the debris out from under the tables and into the aisles of this massive greenhouse. Then in a very satisfying spin up and down the aisles, “Bruce” the Zamboni can easily reach the rubble of the day to vacuum it up. When you turn it off, it kind of spazes and sputters for awhile which can make one wonder, what’s going on?

My co-worker had just finished as I stood talking with my manager, about 50 feet away. He turned it off and as the Zamboni began doing it’s disconcerting thang, he looked questioningly towards my boss. I couldn’t stop myself, and before she could answer him, my inner teen-age boy went for it yelling:

“OH NO YOU BROKE IT!”

My boss almost imperceptibly snorted before she checked herself. I just might be okay.

©Theresa Elliott, All Rights Reserved

One of these things is not like the other, which explains why I have different grasses in my yard now. Golden and All Gold are not the same thing.