To My Job at a Greenhouse in Kalamazoo

1995--the year of jobs. Between the two of us, I think we had 6 or 7 jobs in a year’s time, most of them simultaneously. Part-time gigs, mostly, stringing what we could together, our newly awarded degrees in poetry still crisp and useless at helping us make money.

 

Winter in Kalamazoo was the worst I had ever seen--worse than New York, worse than Indiana. I never imagined a place could get that cold for that long, that the snow could get that deep. Some days, the mail was not delivered.

One job was as a home health aide, a job for which there was no training but should have been. The one patient I took care of was a man dying. Granted, all I had to do was sit with him and watch TV. I brought my students’ papers to grade. He mostly wasn’t lucid and slept a lot of the time. But he would cry; he was in pain. I would call the agency and ask what to do, picking up bottle after bottle, studying all the charts, looking for a medication to ease whatever I could. I went three times until they called to say he died, but they had another patient for me.

No, thank you. I quit.

The paper lists a job opening at a greenhouse. It’s late January and I can’t imagine what the job would be exactly, but go, apply and I’m hired right away. Kalamazoo, as it turns out, is the bedding plant capital of the world, row after row of arched greenhouses in the southeast part of town.

Driving up, I park in front of snowbanks taller than the car. I think sometimes the wind will break me. But inside the greenhouse, I strip down to a t-shirt and jeans. Somehow the sun collects around us and we spend hours sticking seedlings into plastic 6-packs filled with potting soil. We are almost all young women, dirty and sweaty, pushing flats of dirt between the greenhouses on handtrucks. We tie our hair back in bandanas and eat doughnuts that the owner brings in on Saturday mornings.

In a couple months, the flowers are blooming large. The snow and ice outside is melting, and the impatiens and begonias have been fooled into believing it is May--or even June.

Every chance I get, I volunteer to take something from the annuals, several houses over, to the perennials. When I do, I get to pass through the primrose house. These low-growing flowers remind me of the scene in the Wizard of Oz, when they come to the clearing just before the Emerald City and the flowers dazzle. They smell like sugar cereal. I walk very slowly. The primrose path.

Delude me this winter. Promise me this is real and that work always leads to a moment like this.