Re-orienting

 Started a new job two weeks ago.

Oh, you maybe need some background?

Transitioned out of my gardening business when I realized that:

1. My energy level wasn't reliable enough, AND

2. If I wanted this to be lucrative, I could do it for sure, but I'd need to hire folks and up my game. But that's not what I wanted. Not this close to retirement.

So I transitioned my few remaining clients to an energetic millennial (our meet-cute was in the garden-center parking lot where she pulled up in a pickup while I was spraying hort oil on hemlock wooly adelgids. Aaron Sorkin, take notice.)

I decided that I'd like to retire in six years if at all possible, and to do that I'd need a job that paid reasonably.  So while working at the garden center, I started looking.

Initially I looked at local organizations that were involved in the community, or nonprofits passionate about rewilding landscapes or creating natural public spaces out of urban hellscapes. I replied to job postings; replied to them again; sent out letters of inquiry. Attended a workshop in Maine to speak personally to the staff there about jobs.

Crickets.

My local recruiter, upon hearing my minimum salary expectations (which, in hindsight, were insultingly low), balked as if I'd asked for a yacht as part of my signing bonus.

"My clients aren't paying that, really."

"Do your clients live in Massachusetts? Do your clients read what housing goes for?"

In the end I aw an opening for a company I'd worked for in Chicago. In Chicago, I worked for one of their clients; here, I'm working for them proper. So it's a new company to me. A colleague who still worked for the company but had transferred to work internally used the referral feature to get me noticed. And there we go.

The draw was that I'd work for the Boston office but from home.  Two weeks in, and I love not commuting. The pay is respectful, the benefits are great, the people are all very nice, and retiring in 6 is a real possibility. I just need to sock the dosh away.

The downside is that it's easy for people to forget that you need to be given work when you're new and nobody can see you, and they are also working from home, and it's a very busy season so everyone is in their own crisis, and you have no idea what's going on as you sit by yourself, alone at home, in your Steelcase task chair (that you chose because it was markedly cheaper than its colleagues because it's a nauseatingly bright orange that, in fact, has not conveyed Fun and Cheery so much as 1973, and not in a good way), with the odd video chat from London. It took almost a full week just to figure out where things are online, and I crammed all the compliance/training videos to stop the reminder emails from the automated system that now tracks every movement of my existence. (Fun fact: I may not accept a boat as a gift from a business partner. Or anybody. And I can forget that munitions deal with a state-owned Iranian oil company.)

Taking initiative, I sat through three hours of a recorded class. As I struggled to follow the presenter, my Communications Major heart screamed silently in impotent rage as I mentally composed my alternate curriculum (Lesson One: How To Explain Things, Particularly By Incorporating The Word "Because"; Lesson Two: How Not To Cram PowerPoint Slides With Ugly, Messy Graphics Nobody Can Follow).

Per a request, I populated  some templates with information. (Lesson Three: How Not to Make PowerPoint Templates So Crowded As To Be Chaotic, And So Fiddly As To Be User-Hostile, No Matter How Clever and Relevant It Makes The Marketing Department Feel)

Also, there's Technology. Lots and lots of Technology.

Back in The Early Days, tech support was a person who worked out of a small server room/office/TARDIS, and all you had to do for help was call their name and they'd fix whatever was wrong.

I'm no slouch. I can follow directions and problem solve with the best of them. Working from home for a massive international company means most things are very self-service and many are third-party. And with me for some reason, every single simple, unremarkable thing I need to set up in order to do my job has been riddled with problems, so much that I'm beginning to wonder whether it's all part of some secret evaluation process to find my breaking point.

First, it took Tech Support an hour to figure out why I couldn't print to my home printer. Then the work cell phone that was sent to me had a rebooting malfunction and had to be re-ordered, and because you can't open the back of the phone in the newer phones to access the battery, I couldn't pull the power and had to resort to leaving the phone unplugged, sound and vibration off, face-down on my desk to have the android equivalent of grand mal seizures until it ran out of juice. 

The shared cloud drive needed to be configured because I couldn't log into it, and the tech who got it running wasn't able to help me understand it because his accent made him unintelligible, and the awkwardness of asking him to repeat himself over and over got the better of me and I just gave up and thanked him for his help. Then the monitor I purchased won't appear as an option on my laptop.

For each of these issues, I email the third-party tech support, and a ticket is generated. I am pretty much in a committed relationship with India at this point, and I suspect there's a big sign on a wall in Chennai warning everyone about the American who insists the issues aren't user-related.

Today it was getting access to an online database I'll be maintaining. I'd assumed it was a login-permissions situation and voila!

 Ohhhhhh, no.

 First, I had to be given documented email approval by two people, then a person on The Database Team That Lives In Space sent me lengthy instructions that contained a link to a cloud app store for our company, where I'd have to select a particular application, then wait for an email notification that it had been downloaded. Once this happened, I had to open it, do some magic, and then reboot.

Rebooting entails closing a half-dozen apps, re-opening the company VPN (complete with verification code to my phone), then signing into the network, then launching the shared drive, email, and chat programs.

This done, I was then told I had to go to a cloud address, select a particular option, and then while in that "desktop environment," launch the program.

"And I have to do this EVERY TIME I want to access this database?" I asked, incredulous, although I didn't use caps because I'm pretending to be a calm, polite, patient person.  Remote work is good for that ruse.

Immediately after I'd gotten through this, another of the Gamesters of Triskelion emailed me with the NEW instructions for the revised database, which were basically, "Click this and it will download. You'll see the app icon, and all you have to do is click on it to open a selection of sites to access. But first you have to reboot."

I walk downstairs, grab a tangerine, breathe, and go back to my home office.  I start to follow these instructions, but they say, wait!  I first must set Internet Explorer as my default browser! And here are instructions for doing this!   I'm confused, because this browser is no longer supported.  While I'm puzzling over this, I realize it's already downloaded just fine and is happy using our company default browser.

I click on the app icon, the list of options appears, I select the correct one...

...and am brought to a database that has no content, and doesn't give my office as an option.

I reply to the email offer to do a call to walk me through it, saying yes please, when can this happen.

I then log off and go to babysit a friend's 4-year old, where we play some competitive Chutes and Ladders, and then I suggest Hair Salon, because it allows me to sit on my butt and relax while eleventy-five hair elastics and clips are artfully arranged in my hair. I play some music to complement the scene, and when the parents come home I warn them that their little girl might Sashay and Shante, and tell them they better WORK.

The Good Parts

 Now that I've gotten through my big projects, I can take some time to breathe, and took an honest-to-God break in Maine to hang out with a friend and her husband in their log home.  She loves to cook, so much time was spent eating and discussing operational logistics with the husband. Oh, and watching Jaws, because Shark Week. 

God, I love that movie. Robert Shaw gives me what Owen Meany would call THE SHIVERS.

About a month ago, once the invoices had been going out and the checks coming in for awhile, I ran a P&L out of curiosity.

What the..??!!??

I forwarded it to my CPA. "Should we re-evaluate my estimated quarterly tax payment?"

"Hey, that's great!" he responded. "Send me another one at the end of August and we'll figure it out."

I'd netted six times what I'd netted the same time last year.  On one hand, I could see making a LOT of money; on the other, without good help, I'd kill myself. 

The blessings and the curse of COVID.

I'd recently worked a more than 8-hour day in 90+ degree heat, trying to make up for a ton of rainy days, anxious that it was already July and I had clients whose yards were neglected.  I didn't think I was all that affected, but mid-weed I suddenly felt  lightheaded and my vision got a little patchy. I sat down on some stepping stones.  I was in an enclosed side-yard entrance, invisible to the outside world.

"Is this how they'll find me?" I mused.  Not wanting to lose time, I tried feebly to use my scuttle hoe from my sitting position.

 I'd already taken the SEO off my web site and stopped marketing myself. There were just too many frantic homeowners begging me to save them from being on intimate terms with their own property.  I worried that my regular maintenance clients wouldn't be enough, but with the wet weather it's all I can do to keep up, and there are projects that can be done for them.  

I like most of my maintenance clients - I show up, do some work, they pay me.

Recently a retired woman I'd done some minor work for got in touch to help with the "mess" her garden had become. I met her and we looked things over.  She told me what she wanted done.

"It all seems fine," I said. "Do you have any questions for me?"

"Yes. Cost."

I told her it would be straight time and materials, and gave her my rate.

She hesitated. "Maybe to start I'll just have you come for three hours."

I looked past her at the platform they'd had built for their new hot tub, and beyond that to the private boat dock.

"That's fine; we can start with three hours and take it from there."

Here's what will happen: I'll show up, do my three hours, she'll see how nice things are starting to look, and will want me to stay. But I won't be able to, because I'll have other things scheduled.  

Another periodic client is a retired litigation attorney who is hilarious. She sends me pictures of containers she's done with comments like, "When you come by to weed, see what you can do with these. With all the rain, the petunias look like shit."

Today was satisfying. I worked over 8 hours and got on track. I'd so far attempted The Yard of Lightheadedness twice and had had to curtail the visits due to thunderstorms, but today I got it all looking good. There is something very satisfying about having the time to do something right.

I don't wear headphones while I work; I find them too distracting. Instead, I just ride the stream of consciousness. Today's Greatest Hits were:

How do people stay married without hating each other?

Should I try a cross-country trip in the van?

Why can't Margaret Atwood end a story well?

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union..

Maybe Iiiiii didn't love you, quite as often as I should have...

What's this...oh. Poison ivy. Did I see jewel weed back there?

Am I lazy or just jaded?

Tomorrow I have another roster of clients with rain-soaked weeds to pull. For now, I need to address the stabbing pains in my legs, and find the bug spray.

Caste System

 A co-worker at the garden center and I were talking about the bloom leaving the gardening profession. Pun not intended.  She related one of her experiences:

"I was working for this ninety-something woman who had a huge estate. She was a southern-belle type, and had me in for tea from time to time when I was done on her property. On one of these occasions, she mentioned that she wanted to 'buy some of my time and give me to her daughter as a present.'  I felt like a piece of property."

Yup. While nothing quite so blunt has been my experience, I have found that for the most part people who hire gardeners think they do nothing but relax by some shrubbery until summoned to do something with little notice.

Working for other gardeners buffered me from the constant reminder that people who can't pick up the smallest hand tool think it's your birthright to jump to some dirty job they decided needs to be done tomorrow. Even the nicest clients frequently have no concept of Your Time, and think nothing of expecting you to drive twelve miles to install ten annuals that they decided to purchase that day.

I've gotten good at saying no. In fact, most of what I'm saying this year is no. No more large projects. No more big installs. No more yards that have been neglected for years that they suddenly need napalmed this month. I'm open to pretty much maintenance only.

My joint issues have kicked into overdrive, and I'm sore and stiff, and oh yeah, nobody wants to work right now, even though I'm willing to pay an insane hourly rate. I've been through two people already. The first was someone I knew through other activities, and while he seemed knowledgeable and smart when ensconced in the local version of Grey Gardens with his elderly mother, in the field he became a mansplaining, slo-mo nightmare. On the last job for which I used him he was so slow I had to return alone the following day and work an extra 5 hours. Oh yes, flat-fee job. So.

The other candidate had experience, but while she started strong, I suspect depression issues began to play out, and while I'm a sympathetic person, I just need my assistant to get the job done and not spend twenty minutes on something that I can do in about 75 seconds, and I should not be able to move three wheelbarrows of mulch in the time it takes them to mulch the bases of three rose bushes.

I finally connected with someone I'd been in the program with, and with whom I'd worked. He's no longer in the hort biz but is going to work with me on the last large job I have, hallelujah. Ex-marine, martial artist; sling me some mulch, bad boy.

Truth is, I don't like it any more. I work way too hard to be this tired and poor, and I'm losing the interest in detail that makes a good gardener. My joint issues are also front and center, and I'm getting very sore and stiff. A former colleague from Chicago wanted to pick my brain about starting a business and I said, "Don't do it alone. Have someone to bounce things off of, share the pain, share the work. Don't go to bed every night with your head spinning with every thing you have to get done, knowing all of it - every last thing -- is on you."

I have learned a lot. And as a business owner, I've gained a deeper appreciation for being an employee. At the garden center I bumped into a very problematic former employer, but I did thank her for everything I'd learned from her, and I apologized if I ever made her life hard. I think she was blindsided.

Some people love the notion of saving people, of fixing things for them. I like helping people, but, I don't know, there's too heavy a whiff of servitude, of toiling over the weeds while your client is vacationing on the Cape for a month. I raised my fees dramatically, but as another gardener said, "I won't work in this area. All these Yankees are tight-fisted and don't like to pay."  I could make large money if I were miraculously able to get a crew, really expand, and try for the high-end clients with large estates, but at my age, that holds zero appeal.  I just don't want to work that hard anymore. As it is I rarely see my sister, have little time for housework and my uncle, let alone my animals. I'm not complaining, although it sounds like it; I'm re-evaluating and learning from the experience.

I never thought I'd dream of a desk and being paid even if I go to the bathroom as a consummation devoutly to be wished, but there you go. It will be a big adjustment, but I think of it as my next adventure.

My most favorite job will be retirement.  

 

Tough Crowd

The professional gardening world appears comprised mostly of ex-Marines and middle-aged women, and it's unclear which group harbors the most rage.

The common thread seems to be psyches shaped by long-term emotional abuse, and a cheery but hostile defensiveness that we use to unsettle others. Passive aggressively.

On one side, we have young men chewed up and spat out of a military system of emotional sadism that promised them camaraderie and loyalty. I worked with one very muscular jiu-jitsu practitioner whose inscrutable stone face made me want to either hug him, or talk to him gently while I sloooowly took the garden shears from his hands.  In my last job, another ex-Marine was so furiously anal about how we restocked tools that I would not hang so much as a rake without his permission, while wondering how I could get him to smoke a LOT more weed.

On the other side is the 50-something mom who does heavy gardening all day (including heavy tarps, wheebarrows, and tools), who anxiously measures out portions of food in tiny plastic containers (her 10am yogurt break is like a one-woman Running of the Bulls, and God help anyone who gets in the way), and who goes to a cardio class afterwards. She also routinely runs in the morning, and discusses in detail a half-dozen low-cal dinners with chicken as the base ingredient, and she does NOT approve of my abstinence from meat, white or otherwise.

She will not pee outdoors. Ever.

Like me, she is the child of an alcoholic, and I empathize with the control issues; however, once I realized I could say "Screw you!" to those issues, I've spent the time since cultivating a liberating, almost taunting "so what?" approach to most everything. I have realized that there is rarely only one right way.   I realized it's a lot more fun to not constantly self-edit.

This attitude, and my clear disregard for whether others approve of me, drives this poor woman straight up the wall.

And if we're being honest here, I get a kick out of that.

The third middle-aged woman is emotionally needy and chronically depressed, so they hit it off like a house on fire. (My most sympathetic response to her lament about a recent ex was to say, "He's a fucking loser. Move on.")  At one point Needy Woman complained of a headache, and I looked up to see Apotheosis of Mom standing in front of her with a Tylenol and a glass of water.  It was horrifying.

The excuse I gave for my notice was family reasons, because there was no need to say, "I'm bored, I am NOT bonding with the team, and if I'm going to work this hard, it will be for real money for myself."

Nobody misses me.

And if we're being honest here, I'm fine with that.

Or maybe THIS plan....

Throughout the winter I have been exploring my options in an attempt to formulate some kind of strategy about my Next Step. My strategies generally prove maddeningly elusive and change as rapidly as those choose-your-ending books I loved as a teen.

I will move to Maine! I will have a small home on many acres, grow vegetables and keep bees. I will make soap and have an art and pottery studio in the barn. I will sell honey at the farmer's market. 

I began the job search. I had my sights set on a botanic garden and sent off my resume. I got a response (I'm moving to Maine!) that said they had no gardening positions open, but I might want to consider an educational assistant position (sounds a lot like a job that can't pay me to move to Maine). The job description detailed leading children through a kids' garden, talking about plants, feeding chickens, general upkeep. Nothing sounded scary or odd, and if  nothing else would afford me the opportunity to shape the next generation of tree-hugging vegetarians.

If I get a decent job offer from Maine, I'll move to Maine. If the pay is low, I could maybe buy a mobile home. Or rent in a depressed area.

They wanted me to send a resume for the position, so on the advice of a friend I created an entirely new resume, underscoring previous mentoring/educational experience. With youth.

The result was a stellar example of my ability not so much to teach children (although I can) but to create a narrative where teaching SAT classes twenty-five years ago, a few months of supervising teenage interns, and nine months of babysitting made me the love child of Mary Poppins and Mister Rogers.

"Instilled expectations of good behavior and a respect for nature through games and play, daily trips to parks and beaches, and by exploiting children’s natural love of routine, ritual, and expressive communication."

Yes. I actually wrote this. It was fun, this challenge to elevate instinct to skill, and mundane activities  to intentional education. This blurb was my respectable distillation of "We walked to the park! We threw rocks in the lake! We waved hello to the cottonwood trees! I taught them to pull up their shirts every time I yelled 'MARDI GRAS!' I trained them like I train puppies, because it was fun, they loved it, and because I could."

The visit to the street vendor of corn chichas almost made an appearance as, "Developed an appreciation of international cuisine and multicultural interpersonal interaction," but I couldn't quite bring myself.

I heard nothing, but was OK since the pay was super low.

I was in talks with landscapers who were very interested in hiring me, but they operated in southern Maine, which is not much cheaper than Massachusetts. Generally, any area in which a president summers (The Cape, Kennebunkport) is unlikely to present a wealth of cheap apartments or thrift stores, opting instead for four-figure weekly rentals and Consignment Boutiques.

In the end I met with a local landscaper who wants to hire me and is going to get back to me with a job offer once he figures out his crew for the season. I've offered him less than full-time so that I can build my own business.

And so it is that just as I'm waiting to hear from Local landscaper, I get a call from the head gardener at the botanic garden. The Educational Assistant botanic garden. This garden that never has gardener openings now has two openings for full-time seasonal gardeners. On one hand I was a little excited; on the other I was annoyed at this ping-ponging, and a bit sulky about the lack of response to the three hours of brilliant resume writing to reinvent myself as the gardening world's Maria von Trapp.

The Head Gardener was very nice and we got along well. I asked what the position paid, and the level of hemming and hawing made my stomach sink. This was not the response of someone unembarrassed by her answer.

"Interns make about $11 an hour; for regular we could go up to about $13. I mean, it's Maine."

Thirteen. Dollars. UP TO. The last time I'd made that little I'd only slept with two men in my life. I mean, I was a late bloomer, but still.

Shit, I can't afford to move to Maine on what they pay. I'll work here and buy a place in Maine. Then I'll eventually move to Maine.

So I'm here for now, which is fine, if not perfect. I see my aunt in the nursing home regularly, and my sister and I get together and have fun. I know the area, I'm getting my business stuff in order, and if I'm lucky, I'll make a real living this year.

I could just buy land in Maine and grow things and keep bees there. I could get one of those huge room-like tents for when I'm up there. 

I can poop in the woods.

Winter Work

As I make my way through my first winter as a gardener and not a student (or rather, as I make my way through the prospect of a winter with no income), and after no luck finding temporary work on my own, I turned to recruiters. Because it turns out that all my plans of catching up on educational reading in the off season are thwarted by an inability to sit still as long as I'm jobless. As one can imagine, my gardening pay did not provide for a substantial nest egg, which situation was amplified by unexpected dental work for both me and a cat to the tune of almost three thousand in unexpected bills. So any time not spent searching for jobs and sending out resumes was consumed with the preoccupation that I had to look for jobs and send out resumes.

Cue the recruiters.

Landing a good recruiter is tricky at my age, because many recruiters are staffed by people not long out of college who have about five minutes of work experience.  It's surreal to put on a suit and dress shoes and be evaluated by someone who can't make eye contact. As luck would have it, I connected with a recruiter close to my age with whom I could have a conversation undistracted by the anxiety that my evaluation was similar to that of a Tinder date.

(Sidenote: My history of online dating is a hot train wreck of Boschian carnage.) 

So I landed a gig that does not pay anywhere near what I'm worth (ah, temping), but will last for as long as I expect to be out of work, and the staff is nice. No busy phones, no unhappy people. Very little stress.

The best part: They tell me every day how smart I am, how happy they are that I'm there. I've told them I'm a gardener trying to make her way to Maine, and they tell me all the time how much they want to keep me. 

"I wish we could get someone like you," the woman I'm supporting tells me.

"Well, that's easy. Hire someone who's overqualified, pay them 50% more than you've budgeted for the position, and there you go."

I'm basically helping with the mess also known as their accounts payable. The backstory involves a former employee who let bills back up until a vendor's threat to cut service alerted the company that they had a situation.

To be fair, the issue is larger. For one, the accounting system is crap. Don't worry, I won't go into boring detail, but trust me it was not designed by accountants. Given that the basics of  accounting are unchanged since the days of Venetian seafaring merchants, and also given that accounting does not benefit from jazzy new approaches, there is no excuse for this. That I have to enter twelve invoices from one vendor as twenty-four separate transactions rather than as a single batch entry makes me want to hunt down the software provider and use Language.

Then there are the vendors who, rather than taking the time to put the correct PO on an invoice, slap a random or outdated PO number in the apparent assumption that we won't notice. I mentally craft communications where these vendors are notified that a $50 fee per incorrect number will be deducted to cover the additional administrative time.

(Thoughts like these make me realize how pointless modern life can be. The self-righteous indignation of the Purchase Order is the first sign of societal decay. You read it here.)

Another issue is that, despite being in a digital world, the processes at this office are heavily paper-oriented. One process goes something like this: a Purchase Order is generated and put into the accounting system, and an original paper version into a big binder. Incoming bills are then processed, during which they are stamped and  information found on the digitally-generated PO is handwritten on the front. (I've chosen to log this in purple marker as a statement about the triumph of art over bureaucracy.) The invoice is entered into the system against the PO number (which if you just type in creates an error message; you have to type the number and wait several seconds for the system to offer you a selection so that you can choose from the list. Which for a stack of twenty or so invoices is maddening.) Invoices are then created from these entries -- but these require two separate transactions. Of course. Then for each bill, one must go to the shelf of binders, find the PO printout, remove it from the 5-inch-wide binder, which entails hefting all the POs over the huge binder ring to get to the desired PO, and attach it to the bill so that the person approving it can see it. Once the bill is paid, the PO is re-inserted into the Unholy Cumbersome Binder.   

Wait, you ask. Can't the POs be scanned and saved to a network folder, where they can be easily reviewed by the approver?  Yessiree, Bub, they sure can. They can also be scanned into the accounting system for people like me who have to process bills that about half the time have incorrect POs on them.

But they aren't. Because change.

Most of what I know is from inference, because most communication starts with an assumption that you have had some prior informative conversation on the subject at hand with an extraterrestrial source.  

Take the office manager, who is one of the nicest women I've met, and one of my favorite people there. Unflappable, helpful. Also the worst communicator ever. A master of the seeming non sequitur, which is the result of spitting out the last sentence to a long internal conversation, or assuming that you live in her head.

"Did you get the things from the book?" she asked me on my fourth day.

"What 'things' exactly, and what book?" I asked.

"The PO Book."

"There's a PO book?"

"The ones in the room."

"Any particular room?"

Another time she said out of the blue, "I'll bet she took them from the folder before putting them into the other thing. Did she record them?"

I considered my many possible replies, and decided that "I don't know," was safest. I also consulted the Internet for symptoms of dementia.

It became my own personal pastime to decode her arcane statements. One day she asked, "What do you do when your printer has no words?"

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking the printer had run out of ink, and that's a good guess, so don't be too hard on yourself. What she meant was along the lines of, "When your printer has an error and has only icons and no display screen WITH WORDS, how do you know how to fix the problem?"

Then there is the filing. After looking in the umpteen places a document might be, I gave up.

"I've been looking for the Staples PO for this bill we got. I checked the books in the room and the new ones in A--'s office, but I can't find it. Do you know where else I might look?"

"Did you look under 'S'? A lot of people do that by mistake."

"I did actually, what with 'Staples' starting with -- you know. An S."

"It's a corporate charge account so it goes in the credit-card book."

You know how in school you and your friends whine about the dubious real-world utility of what you learn in a classroom? This is the first time I've had a working knowledge of the alphabet prove useless.

But I'm appreciated, it's an easy paycheck so far, they're going to put me in my own office to help with a special project, and things that would bother me if I were invested in the company as a permanent job are just things I'll be walking away from in a couple of months. 

If ever I am tempted to fall back on my mad office skills and get an office job where I'm not struggling financially, the rapidity with which my joints are seizing up is reminder enough that I do not want a desk job. It's frightening how quickly the aches and pains set in. It's fun to wear my cute blue boots and kicky skirts, sure, but I do miss my garden boots and mud gloves, and I feel naked without my pruners.

Pruners. Filed under P. Dammit.

Is that the Star of Bethlehem?

The news says that this year is the worst for the flu since the Swine Flu epidemic of 2009. Explains why the cold I caught a month ago has been about as ephemeral as a Cher farewell tour.

My Christmas present was a house to myself. My uncle, parents, and sister made their annual pilgrimage to the Holy Land, also known as a casino in Connecticut, and the visiting relatives spent the day with their daughter and her family.

In our culture, the icon of loneliness is the person facing Christmas Day in solitude. To that I say: it's all about context. Besides, with  a house full of animals, I'm not exactly alone (ammiright, BabyJesusInAManger?)

I watched an on-demand movie ("Birdbox." Meh) and organized my bedroom, which included some tough love regarding clothing I'd bought while having a good day ("I can SO pull off a stretch zip-up magenta top with chartreuse spots!" "Black corduroy mini skirts are ME!") all the while thankful I thrift shop, so the experiments carried more chagrin than real financial regret.

I got my estate-planning documents in order and emailed copies to relevant people ("On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me..... a Durable Power of Attorneeeeeeeeey!")

I visited my 92-YO great-aunt ("Auntie, have you been naughty or nice?" "Naughty!" "THAT's my girl!"), and took a hike in a state park where, true to form, I spent a half-hour walking some really weird paths that seemed to just run behind houses, then through a cemetery, until I returned to the parking lot to realize the trail heads were ACROSS the street, so I walked there until the sun started to go down, which only made me more manic with desire to buy a house in Maine with some honest-to-God Nature right out my back door.

And I coughed. Constantly. Maybe because of my asthma, which in turn may be because of allergies or may be just another side-effect of the stupid B-list autoimmune disease I have that nobody ever heard of because nobody ever dies from it, they just get really, really annoying symptoms, or maybe because of the lingering Cher-cold, or all three.

Last night I coughed a nonstop cough so classically dry I was sure an olive would fly out of my mouth, which meant I could not keep my CPAP mask on, so it was a free-for-all to see whether the coughing, congestion, apnea, or the cats who thought it therapeutic to encircle me in a claustrophobic cartouche would deprive me of the most oxygen/sleep.

Before I go on to the next part, some background.

In my 30s I was sitting in the South End apartment of a friend, and, while she finished up some things, I passed the time by opening  a copy of Whitley Streiber's Communion. This was a big juicy book about his supposed experience with alien abduction. I figured it would be fluffy enough to pick up and put down with no regrets when it was time to leave. How deliciously, mindlessly sensational.

Twenty minutes into it I was in a pounding sweat. Whitley was describing in detail an event that had also happened to me when I was five.  Now, I have no memories of abduction, but I do have his memories of gray men in my room, of being touched on the forehead by a wand and being paralyzed, being terrified almost to the point of hysteria while these beings moved in and out of my line of vision, of feeling their touch (never intimate) without being able to move from it. Experiencing the kind of terror that, if you were dreaming, would cause you to wake up. Only I never did.

I have no recollection of being taken out of my room, but I do remember having this experience with minor variations several times in my childhood. I'd chalked it up to being a nightmare-prone kid, and forgot it as an adult. Until Whitley brought it all back down from the dusty mental attic, cold terror and all.

I'm not saying it was aliens, but how did he experience the exact same things? Is there some Jungian effect at work here? Some strange default the mind takes when our sleep paralysis doesn't quit?

I mention this episode because last night I managed to doze off, finally, but was woken abruptly by a low, very loud thrumming. The head of my bed is in a corner of the room, with a window directly to my left, and one at my feet to the right. We live by a wooded area.

I felt my whole body vibrate with the thrumming, and saw a blindingly bright light (like LED headlights) through both windows. And -- this is important -- the cats jerked to attention.

I could not move. I could move my eyes, but not my head or my limbs or open my mouth.

The first thought I had was, "They're back." This time I wasn't so much terrified as nervously curious, and hoped that if they were going to do anything particularly unpleasant to me they'd have the good manners to knock me out first. So, not unlike a visit to the endodontist.

And then the lights dimmed and suddenly it was morning and I was looking out not at a blinding light but at daylight with a very confused sense that something had just been erased like a badly edited film. If you've had surgery you know the feeling: "100, 99 98...hey, how'd I end up here and yes, I will have that ginger ale!"

What bothered me most? I still had the cough.  If they could manage interstellar travel, inflict paralysis at will, and erase memory, couldn't they have at least given me some advanced goddamn Space Robitussin?  Or would that have been the metaphorical butterfly wing-flap that tore the fabric of space and time?

Stupid aliens.

Don't break it down for me

I work with a  crew member whom I adore, and who also sometimes drives me nuts, and at one point had me considering looking for a new job. But I decided to make it work, figured out her hot buttons, and learned how to accommodate them. And practiced being less impatient. It helps that it's obvious that she cares and wants everyone to be happy, and is essentially a kind, generous soul.

Our communication styles are diametrically opposed. I'm direct, usually too much so; she is deferentially circuitous to the point of abstraction.  An example of how our styles contrast:

Me: "Those shastas look like crap; I'll cut them back."

She: "I'm thinking that we could offer our assistance to those poor shastas over there, which look a wee bit forlorn, so do you think that you could perhaps give them some attention so that they don't look so yucky?"

While she's giving instructions like this, I'm practically doing a jitterbug of impatience. She also has to hunt for words a lot, so her instructions are loaded with "uhs" and "ums," making it all the more  brutal. I've learned to just wait it out, breathing deliberately, because I get paid either way.

She also constantly forgets two key things about me:

1. I have no sense of direction. Unless the direction is for a location within a block of where I am, please just give me an address I can plug into my phone, or some really unique landmarks to guide my way. Even though I've been to a location a dozen times over the summer, I will not know how to get to it on my own. Do not tell me to go to Main street and take a right on 122 and then left on Wing, because I'm lost already. I've explained that it's like dyslexia, and just accept that I have a learning issue when it comes to directions.

"At any given point in our day," I explained to her, "I could not begin to tell you how I would drive home; I could not even tell you in what direction I'd head. I cannot visualize how the streets relate to one another. My brain forms no mental map as I travel."

After about three of these explanations, she still insists on giving me directions, so I treat it like her learning disability that she can't understand my disability, so, resisting the urge to Lindy Hop, I listen to her directions and say, "Great, thanks! And the address?"

 2. I'm having some serious bladder issues related to other conditions. I have no problem using the outdoor executive washroom, so I usually just give a heads up that I'm heading into the woods/behind a huge rhododendron/storage shed. I've become adept at sight lines and stealth squatting.

No matter how many times I've explained that when the urge hits, I have to answer it pretty quickly, she stops and delays me by offering stammering suggestions on the nearest coffee shops that I could use instead, or, when the location does require me to drive to a coffee shop, starts giving me directions (!!!) rather than let me use my phone.  One day our conversation went like this:

Me: "I'm heading to Dunks to use the restroom--"

She: "Oh! If you want, um, um, there's a coffee shop close by, um, about oh, two miles or so. There's one down by the um - the um --Panera on Route 3, you know that one? You um --go down the street--"

Me: "I've just peed myself."

She: "Oh! Oh, well I'll let you go."

Me: "Thanks; be right back."

Then there are the house descriptions. She avoids the most obvious clues, using streets once again fortheloveofGodMontresor.

She: "The big house at the end of the street."

Me: "Gonna need more."

She: "They have the two containers."

Me: "Still nothing."

She: "They have the little front porch with the tiny boxes."

Me: "You mean the house with the two German Shepherds?"

She: "Yes, that's the one."


Another time:

She: "The house on Main Street."

Me: "Not getting a visual."

She: You cut back all the amsonia."

Me:"You mean the Dead Rabbit house?"

She: "That's the one."

For me,  two big dogs who run up and slobber all over you, or discovering two dead (likely poisoned) rabbits in the bed you were weeding would be the lead. Not "The brown house on the corner."

I also have a much fouler mouth, and I hate maintaining day lilies. So the one day when I looked over to see her yell,  "FUCKING DAY LILIES!!" I knew we'd finally come to a meeting of the minds.

The Adventures of Plant Girl, Part I

[This is a draft I didn't publish at the time it was originally written, in the first part of 2018. I thought it might be interesting to document my experiences as an interior plant technician, and then decided you didn't need to hear about over-watered dracaenas and mealybug. You're welcome.]

Plant Girl is covering a new office today, because the plant girl previously assigned there got tired of being stalked by a partner of the firm whose apparent aspiration is to be the Justin Bateman character from Juno.

Plant Girl has promised her supervisor that she will not get into it with Stalker Man, but in her fantasies:

[STALKER MAN becomes highly agitated at the realization that his stalkee is gone for good. PLANT GIRL closes door to his office and faces him with a cool, level stare.]

PG: You're an attorney, aren't you?

SM: Yes...

PG [leaning on desk, crime-drama style]: So you'll understand when I say: Cease. And. Desist.

SM [leaning back, a cornered rat]: I- I don't know what your'e talking about! I was just sharing some music I thought she might be interested in! I was just being friendly! I-

PG  [silences him with a long stare]: I think we both know that's not true. So. Those pothos aren't going to water themselves. I'll be going.

[EXIT PLANT GIRL, victorious, watering can in hand, leaving STALKER MAN speechless and terrified]

Hire me. Oh, wait.

Not only is the frost on the pumpkin, the squirrels have eaten it beyond recognition. Winter is coming to New England, but thanks to a lot of rainy non-work days last month we are still out there, cutting back frozen day-lily leaves and stabbing winter greens into rock-hard planters.I have perfected my layering configuration, and keep a ready supply of hand warmers in my car.

Still, work days are numbered, so I've begun the ritual hunt for seasonal work. I live in an expensive state, a state which constantly boats a good economy, yet the job wages that are posted would not keep a teenager in school clothes. I am stunned (STUNNED) that whether I manned a cash register at a supermarket or supported an office of highly paid professional services staff, the difference in pay if any, would be minimal. I don't mind lower pay for a relatively easy job, but if you want to use all my mad skills, there is a price tag on that.

I was commiserating with a woman I know. She has an advanced degree, is an adjunct professor at a big-name college in Boston, has published a book, and she works part-time at a well-known clothier for $14 an hour to make ends meet. A clothier whose shirts routinely cost $100.

The other problem is that given my extensive job history I've become adept at decoding job postings, determining what exactly will make me hate the job, and how quickly. Some phrases that set me off:

"Bright, enthusiastic worker greeting people with a ready smile."  I kid you not. Guess which gender usually holds the kind of job this description is attached to? Translation: "Be a nice and non-confrontational girlfriend surrogate for a bunch of fragile egos." Since when is it my job to make you feel good? What ever happened to a courteous, professional demeanor?

"A sense of humor is a must." Translation: "You will routinely be involved in our version of the Caucasian Chalk Circle, with you in the role of the baby. Be prepared to be pulled in several directions at once by rude, inconsiderate colleagues with a grossly overdeveloped sense of importance, or one high-level manager with a reputation as a Grade-A douchebag who can't be fired because he owns the place/makes us a lot of money.  Also, you must make coffee and keep the break room stocked, brightly and enthusiastically, wearing a ready smile."

I will not make travel arrangements. This is for people either functionally illiterate in the online world, or who just can't be bothered, neither of  which inspires. I have a terrible poker face/body language when being asked to perform pointless tasks for lazy people.

I will not work for less competent/professional people who make more money than I. So if your web site has typos or has clearly not had its content reviewed by a professional, or if you think it's really important for the public to know which health club you belong to, move along.

Lest you think I'm lazy (well, I am when I'm not engaged), I do apply for jobs with a reasonable commute, good working conditions, and reasonable duties.

 But we haven't yet talked about age discrimination.

Age discrimination is the delusion that because I'm not under 35, I'm a doddering fool with no mental agility who thinks technology is proof that aliens exist.  The reality is that I've adapted many, many times to a world constantly changed by technology, I don't live on my phone, and I understand that you don't look at your phone while on the job, or while someone is talking to you. 

I read goddamned books. I READ.

I was encouraged by a posting by a well-known and respected nonprofit organization that operates fitness centers and residences, but while looking at the job description, a flag went up when I read a line about "enforcing policies even if disagreeing with them." Hmmm. Clearly this has been an issue, or why in the job posting?

Using my Old People Internet Skills, I found a copy of their Employee Handbook. They do not allow (among other things): "elaborate" hairstyles, visible tattoos, or facial piercings such as nose piercings.  It should have just said, "Nothing that scares suburban white people." Made me want to dye my hair blue, get a "Mama Tried" neck tattoo, and show up in a suit. But Hey! You do get a half-hour lunch break!

I went to another job site for a package-delivery company where I was told there was a hiring fair. I had been told there was a hiring fair because I'd started an online application and didn't complete it, but was nonetheless stalked by this company that behaved like a needy ex-boyfriend. Emails reminding me to complete my application were replaced by voicemails encouraging me to apply, finally telling me of this "hiring fair."

When I hear the words "hiring fair" I envision a clean, bright conference room in neutral tones,  tables staffed with smiling, overeager employers ready to win you over with logo-printed ballpoint pens and reusable shopping bags. Given the relentless pursuit by this company, I assumed they were desperate, and expected an enthusiastic welcome, a negotiable wage, maybe even free coffee and snacks (that's when you know you have them).

I went to the address given but found only a dingy distribution center with two haggard women in company sweatshirts manning the front desk. The younger one was too busy looking at her phone to acknowledge me (SEE??!!??) They had no idea about a hiring fair. Considering grimly that this was a sampling of my potential coworkers, I followed the older woman through swinging doors into the main warehouse, a place devoid of natural light and heat, barely illuminated by some weak, invisible fluorescents high overhead. (If you have seen the movie "Alien," I think I've discovered the inspiration for the Nostromo.) There were no balloons, no bright colors, no enthusiastic welcome.

No pens.

We turned left in the gloom, and I had to step over a conveyor belt to be led into the break room, where a guy named "Mitch" was supposed to meet me. The woman instructed me to wait, and left.  The room was a small, airless, cold place of laminate tables with attached benches and a vending machine in the corner. Two men looked at me curiously. My mind turned to unmarked graves.

"Is one of you Mitch?" I asked. I was told no, but he would be right back.

I turned my attention to a poster with, among other things, the company dress code. This company also had the heebie-jeebies about tattoos, ears with more than one earring (women), earrings in more than one ear (men). Mustaches were allowed, but no beards or goatees. Apparently HQ was in a warmer climate that did not understand the protective benefits of facial hair in winter, or that mustaches went out with the pedophile/70s Porn Star fashion craze.

As I read the list of style prohibitions, a scene from the movie "Moonstruck" came into my head, specifically the phrase, "A wolf with no foot."

I took out my cell phone, went back into the dim warehouse cavern, clambered back over the conveyor belt, and re-entered the service area. I explained I'd just gotten an emergency text that I had to address, but I'd be back. I hustled to my car, drove out of the chain-link-and-barbed-wire-enclosed parking lot, and headed home.

A wolf with all her feet.

1400 Christmas trees on the wall, 1400 trees...

My work at a garden center this fall ended with the usual end-of-year ritual of this business: the purveying of the holiday greens and Christmas trees.

In my blue-collar childhood, the erection of the Christmas tree was a delirium-inducing affair that heralded a season of anticipation and wonder, of huge snowfalls and piles of gifts covering the apartment's living-room floor. (My father used to work a side job for the now-defunct Parker Brothers toy company, so we were never at a loss for board games. Interestingly, he also worked part-time for a jail situated directly across the road from PB, which may have exacerbated his neuroses. He was not a hardened man, despite his marriage to my mother.)

Because we always had an artificial tree, I, with my child's egotism, assumed this was because artificial trees were superior to their ephemeral natural counterparts, and I pitied my friends who had to settle for fragrant, feathery boughs and disappointingly non-segmented trunks.

The first best part of the tree ritual was my mother telling my father it was time. This was said in a casual way, suggestive of a choice in the matter, but the sudden silence, the angry terror on my father's face revealed the truth: he was that tree's bitch, and we all knew it.

The tree resided in the cellar in a huge cardboard box that got more battered each year. It was comprised of a three-part central pole that screwed together and contained color-coded holes that matched -- once upon a time -- the paint on the wire ends of the tree "branches." These were heavy, twisted wire covered in some form of plastic blue-green bristles that endeavored to look coniferous. The overall effect was of an overly large broom handle sprouting green toilet brushes.

Over the years, the paint on the "branch" ends began to wear off, which led to the second part of the tree ritual: the arguing. We kids enjoyed this almost as much as the decorating. My father would try in vain to insert the branches correctly the first time so as to avoid my mother's editorializing, but we all knew this was a futile endeavor, and watched his progress with the combination of pity and glee usually reserved for kids who threw up in school.

After a period of criticizing by my mother, yelling by my father, and taunting laughter from us kids, my father had to string the lights. This was the '70s, so a broken strand would be fixed by unscrewing the large, offending bulb and replacing it. It was our job to find the bulb, which we did with gusto. After this, we all decorated the tree, a process that restored harmony as we happily dug out our favorite pieces and hung them, transforming a hideous monstrosity into something beautiful and bright.

If our family Christmas-tree ritual smacked of Tennessee Williams, the tree drama that played out in the garden center was a mix of Shakespearean melodrama and operatic tragedy.

We started with over 1,400 trees from Quebec province. Purchases began the day after Thanksgiving, with people concerned about the "freshness" of the trees, but demurring at the suggestion of a $3.49 bottle of preservative that would actually keep them fresh, sensing some kind of compensatory scam.

The Frasier Firs went first, because this is a clientele that believes in Better and Worse, and they want Better, always. The center indulges this by selling Frasiers that have been sheared in the last year for a denser, more traditional shape. The hoi polloi settle for balsam firs.

(I'd always gotten my trees from supermarket parking lots, and a pop-up lot manned by a gentle if embittered semi-alcoholic selling trees from a tiny trailer. My criteria had been size --small, please-- and price --also small, please).

Watching people inspect trees with all the intensity of affluent but barren couples in a Chinese orphanage was another new exposure to The Way Rich White People Think.

And then, a week before Christmas, we sold out. We bought several trees from local vendors also down to the dregs, but who kept the few remaining larger ones for their own customers. Stragglers hurried in, desperate and astonished, their faces masks of the dawning hysteria from forays to other tree yards that places were emptying, that they had waited too long. They looked in tattered shock at the few trees we had left.

"Are these all the trees you have?" they'd squeak in Puccinic dismay.

"Uh, yes. How many do you need?"

"Well, one, but.."

"Well, we have more than one."

But they wanted choice. They wanted to believe that the tree they bought was a special tree, a tree for them; picking from a cluster of five trees, albeit perfectly good ones, hinted at remainders, of other people's cast-offs, and that would not do.

When we were down to about four trees, an older man and and his wife arrived; he looked at the small selection in disdain and, shoulders back and three-quarters turned in a way that recalled nothing so much as Macbeth cheating to the audience as he cried Lay on Macduff! he announced to me across the tarmac, "I have been buying trees here for TWENTY-ONE years, and this is the first time I won't be buying my tree here!"

"We do have trees," I said, gesturing, courteous but unmoved by his existential crisis. "We did have over fourteen hundred, but they sold out."

Because people who make this such a fucking life-or-death event have the sense to not wait seven days from Christmas to shop for a tree.

"They aren't large enough!!!"

Ah, yes. The large tree. The one that will rise like Babel's Tower under the cathedral ceiling/in the atrium/next to the fireplace. The one designed to impress. There were at least two trees remaining that could honestly claim six feet, but no. No, they would not do. They lacked presence.

The man looked at his poor wife and announced balefully, "I guess we won't have a tree this year!"

From my cashier's window in the unheated shed where I'd spent four hours in thirty-degree weather, I smiled my broadest smile, leaned forward, and said,

"But you have each other."

Is it a musical if it's not..you know... musical?

A family friend supports an amateur theater group in a neighboring town. So far I've been able to rely on "conflicts" to avoid such things as "Nunsense." (My mother: "That Sister Amnesia was SO funny!") I smile, knowing I'd have hated it and its formulaic easy laughs.

Most things that my family finds entertaining I find cringeworthily awful. I'm not trying to be a snob (I went to a sing-along showing of Grease; I can have mindless fun as much as anybody). But they are the kind of people who think Olive Garden is Dining Out, and a weekend in a Connecticut casino is the pinnacle of a vacation experience. It doesn't make me happy that I dislike pretty much everything they enjoy; I feel churlish and unkind (remember Zooey sitting on the bathtub at the beginning of J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey? Yeah; like that. Sometimes I see myself dead in the rain.)

So I decided to Make An Effort, and went with my uncle, mother, sister, and another family friend to this theater to see Jack The Ripper: The Whitechapel Musical.

The title had promise. It could either be incredibly dark or it could be hilarious.

Well, it turns out it wasn't dark, although it tried to be. And it was also hilarious, another result not even on nodding terms with the intent.

An actor gave the Turn Off Your Phones speech in character before the show, and inserted dramatic pauses wide enough to drive a freighter through. When the Turn Off Your Phones speech gets milked, it does not bode well.

My mental notes:

When you are cutting someone's throat, it's done quickly, because in real life people don't hold still while you sllllooooowwwlly drag your Eeeeeeeeviiiiiilll kniiiiffeeeee across their throat for overly dramatic effect.

When a character says things like "I'm so afraid!" or "Who will be next?!?" Don't have them sit casually on the line and sip their drink.

To be fair, this was an odd and difficult choice for amateur theater, primarily because 99% of the show was sung. As in, instead of saying lines, they were sung. Judging from what I saw, whomever wrote the music is overfond of Phillip Glass. Predominately minor notes and forced harmonies to the point I wanted to grab the knife myself and take the easy way out.

There were a couple of genuinely decent songs, but most of them were appallingly trite. I felt bad for the cast, except for when I wanted to beat them into picking up the godforsaken pace.

During intermission, after a first act that contained something like forty tortuous songs, my uncle turned to me and said, "the songs are a little harsh. A little..."

"I think the word you're looking for is 'awful,' I suggested. He smiled and nodded conspiratorially.

It didn't help that we were in the first row (NEVER the first row!) and I would be overcome by fits of laughter when The Ripper made his appearance. I hid behind my program and tried not to shake, lest I destroy any confidence.

My mother loved it.

Smelling

I have always been blessed/cursed with a prodigious sense of smell.

I never realized that I experienced the world in a more olfactory way than most other people; I just thought other people had a greater tolerance for offensive odors than I did.

The first real memory I have of the dawning realization that I might be different was a time about 28 years ago when I was at my grandmother's house with my family.We walked through the front door, and I stopped.

"There's a dead mouse in here," I pronounced, thinking I was merely voicing what, surely, everyone else had also noticed.

My mother turned to me. "A what?"

"A dead mouse."

"Where do you see a dead mouse?"

"Can't you smell it?" I asked, as waves of thick, putrid-sweet decomposing rodent gagged at the back of my throat.

"I don't smell anything," my mother said, with her trademark annoyance.

Thinking my mother was just being her standard contrary self where I was concerned, I asked the rest of the family, "Don't you smell it?"

They looked at me blankly. "No," each one said, although my obvious certainly was starting to unnerve them in a "She sees dead people" way.

I went upstairs to use the bathroom; the air on the second floor was blessedly purer.

I returned to the first floor, and a wave of Dead Thing hit me in the face like a damp rug.

"OH MY GOD HOW CAN  YOU NOT SMELL THAT?!?"

By now they were looking at me in a way that made me think of Ingrid Bergman and faulty lighting.

Ignoring their nervous stares, I dropped to my knees and began sniffing the floor, I kid you not, like an honest-to-God bloodhound. I followed the smell to an upholstered chair with panels hanging from the front. I stood, pulled the chair a few feet, and there was the body of a small mouse, its side bearing a puncture mark. Clearly my grandmother's small dog had bested the poor thing, which had crawled under the chair to die.

"AAAAAH HA!" I exclaimed triumphantly, pointing to the dead mouse.

My family looked at the mouse, then at me, and then, after a bit of silence, my mother said,

"Well, I never smelled it."


I noticed at one office job that I was the only one who smelled my boss's foot odor and bad breath. Others just smelled an office; I smelled a pit of foot sweat and gingivitis and would often breathe through my mouth when meeting with her.

It affected my personal life, too: I'd been married to a man who had bad gums, smoked, and never saw a dentist. That was the least of our problems, but I stopped letting him touch me. No sex without foreplay, no foreplay without kissing, and no kissing when your partner's mouth smells like a dumpster on a warm day.

A former boyfriend likewise was dentist-averse, and would have to brush his teeth before I could kiss him. When we'd first started dating he'd given up cigarettes; I'd explained I wouldn't date a smoker, and that if he voluntarily gave them up, he should harbor no illusions about getting away with sneaking one.

He kissed me one night, and I asked, "Did you have a cigarette?"

He was astonished. "I had one. Yesterday morning."

"Yeah. I can taste it. That's what I meant about being able to tell."

"Wow, I'm impressed."

"You should be. Go brush your teeth."

It makes life harder for me and others, but hygiene is not negotiable. Perhaps the subsequent women in these men's lives couldn't tell anything was amiss; for me it was like visiting a body farm. I imagine they are far happier with women who can't smell the teeming bacteria in their inflamed gums from across the room. Ah, love.

When I moved into my uncle's house, I could tell when I walked in the door that the cat box in the cellar needed changing and the dehumidifier needed emptying.

I could also tell that one of his cats had sprayed in several parts of the house. I soon discovered that the spraying would be resumed, on my belongings.

So while I silently retched at the stench of cat piss, and sniffed all over the house with a rag in one hand and a can of Nature's Miracle on the other, my uncle looked on in astonishment.

"I can't smell anything," he'd say, and I wanted to yell, "HOW does anyone not smell cat piss???!!??"

(Or cat crap outside the box, or the funk of a humid basement, but one battle at a time.)

Like a ghost hunter, I'd tracked down all the haunted spots -  instead of cold spots, they were pockets of smell that I would travel into, stop, back up, and try to pinpoint. I'd gotten all but two, which eluded me.

And today was the victory. Zounds, Jenkins, I cracked The Case of the Ephemeral Stairway Stink and The Mystery of the Living Room Miasma!

Every time I ascended the carpeted stairway, I'd smell cat pee about halfway up. I'd stop, drop, and smell. Nothing. Could not find the source. I sniffed the floors, the walls; nothing.

Today I cracked the case with the help of two of my cats, who pointed me right to the odor.(My cats don't spray. Fact, not delusion.)

At the top of the stairway is a bathroom, which is my uncle's, and one I rarely use. I watched my cats sniff vigorously at the base of the shower curtain. I dropped and smelled. Eureka!

The reason I always smelled it when I was halfway up the stairs is because it was there that my nose was on the same level as the bottom of the shower curtain. Brilliant.

As for the living room, I finally determined that the Piss Ground Zero was tucked behind the cat tree, soaked into a corner of curtain. I took one of the several cans of nature's Miracle strategically placed around the house, and nailed it.

To quote the line from Poltergeist, This house is clean.

For now.

A Farm Farewell

Today was my last day at the farm. This is a beautiful property purchased and restored by a woman ("Erica") with a dream.

What the dream is, she hasn't really been able to articulate. 

It's a demonstration farm. Only she doesn't want lots of people on her property.

It's a farm for growing and selling herbs, only she only wants to do wholesale despite issues with the ability to produce on a wholesale level, and her recalcitrance at having the salesperson actually try to drum up sales for fear that things will move too fast, and terrible things like success will happen, possibly leading to people on her farm.

The other offerings are cool workshops on homesteading skills, offered at the farm and designed to bring people to the farm.

You see the mind-fuckery here.

Coming from an extremely wealthy family has allowed her the luxury of hiring people and buying expensive equipment and draft horses and and retaining an expensive architect who specializes in historical restoration.The place is beautiful, has won restoration awards, and hey, if this is what she likes, go her. I liked her, although she can be stubborn and moody in that way that people with a big buffer of cash can indulge in.

The thing is, when you are trying to understand your goals and purpose each day, it can be a bit frustrating. So I would often comfort myself by kissing the horses and wandering the permaculture garden, where I'd eat things off the ground.

It wasn't a terrible job, but after a few months, the sense of not really fitting in was wearing thin. There was a cliquishness between the head gardener "Penny" and one of the other women,"Sally," and while the marketing gal "Karen" was super nice, she had the attention span of a cat in a room with a flock of moths.

Then we had the other part-time help, a young man,"Wilson." right out of college. His major had been music, but apparently his permaculture workshop certificate, accompanied by his ability to make declarative statements and carry a penis, earned him a deference that baffled me.  

I sensed an issue with Penny during my interview, when she told me somewhat defensively that she didn't have a degree but learned all she knew when she lived overseas. I'd come across this before, this fear that my college education was somehow going to cramp their authority. The owner hired me, and I tried to keep a low profile, hoping to learn from Penny, but she barely spoke to me, and I'd arrive to the farm to find her disappeared somewhere in the extensive garden. I mentioned to Sally that I'd been hoping to learn more than I was.

"Oh, Penny really doesn't like to manage or explain. She just prefers to be in the garden."

Except that Penny was the head gardener, and seemed to find the need to give me work just one more chore, which meant I usually had to track her down to ask what she needed me to do. One morning I arrived and couldn't see her, so I started harvesting some pole beans Karen had said we needed for our six farm shares (oh yes; we were also sort-of selling farm shares, in a half-assed what-can-we-find-today way). 

Penny eventually appeared in the distance, saw me, and bitched me out loudly from a knoll for not coming to her first, because she might have something for me to do.

What ran through my head as possible responses:

"If you are so concerned about organization and assigning chores, HEAD GARDENER, you might want to be at the top of the garden WHEN WE ALL ARRIVE AT 9 rather than buggering off a half-acre away in your own world, and I'm not sure how many times I can suggest a daily morning gathering to discuss the strategy for the day, only to have my idea embraced by the others and dismissed by you."

"Why is it I'm the only one who catches shit for doing what everyone else does when they don't want to track you down by the freaking calendula? Why is this tone of voice reserved for me?"

"Fuck you and the Monarda fistulosa you rode in on."

What I actually did was put down my harvest basket and say, "I'm really sorry, Penny; Karen had said we needed this for the CSA today, and since I couldn't find you I wanted to be productive, so I started in on this, but I can certainly do this another time if you have something pressing."

Feel like an overreacting asshole yet?

"Well... no, I don't, but I want you to come to me first."

Then what the fuck?!?!?

"I understand, and really, if you have something you'd rather have me work on, I'm happy to do this later."

Because I'd hate to recklessly focus on the farm shares that are being picked up today when I could be satisfying your need for a good old kowtow, by harvesting herbs for which we have ZERO buyers.

"No, I don't have anything."

Except a giant bug up your ass.

"OK, so I'll do this then, and check in with you when I'm done."

I didn't question the validity of the message; what irked my shit was that she rarely spoke to me, and when she did, it wasn't "Hey, could you make sure to check in with me," it was Full Bore Spank in a tone that she would never, EVER have used on the other workers. I was being treated like some wayward adolescent, and I wondered whether she was projecting some sort of insubordination motivation on me because my education threatened her.

Oh yeah, there was another thought:

Really? For fifteen dollars an hour I have to take this?

So the weeks went by, and the loneliness and irritation grew, and there was only so much bright smiling I could do when I saw people or asked what needed to be done, and I watched Wilson decide he wanted to focus on making tea, and didn't want to do more onerous things, and whined about having to walk across the farm, and he was completely accommodated and not once reined in, and I seethed at the remembrance of the Pole Bean Ass-chewing. And the other women discussed their hobbies and gossiped about mutual acquaintances, and the latest projects their contractor husbands were working on, and I remembered why I hate the North Shore suburbs.

At the beginning of this, my last week, a school bus full of ten-year-olds arrived for a field trip. I was sent to stake some blown-over dahlias in the garden, which I proceeded to do. While I was doing this, Penny came by with part of the group.

"We've planted peach trees and apricot trees and medlars and paw paws," she rattled off, while the kids squinted at her.

They're TEN. They have no idea what medlars are. Or paw paws. tell them what they are and why they were planted. Explain permaculture.

But no. Explaining isn't her thing.

They came down by where I was working. She saw them looking at me.

"JC is staking some dahlias that blew over," she said in passing as they went by.

I stood and smiled. "We like to keep these off the ground because it's important to have good air circulation around them, or they can develop things like fungus, and be susceptible to bugs and disease."

Penny just looked at me and then started a pollinator speech.

"Which are the best pollinators? Bees. Right."

Tell them which bees, and why.

Nope.

They are standing in front of a bank of lemon balm. Pick some and let them smell it.

Nope.

Finished with my chore, I headed up and walked into Penny's buddy, Sally, with a group. Everyone was helping, it seemed, except the person who used to organize and lead tours for school kids at an animal shelter. Who would that be? Oh right.

"Hey, guys," I said to the kids, "Make sure you don't touch anything without checking with Sally first, because we have stinging nettles in here and if you touch them they are worse than a bee sting."

"Oh --oh yeah," Sally said absently, walking past me.

You're welcome.

Today there was another tour, and I watched Erica try to gain control of her group as I potted some plants she'd asked me to collect for a float for the fair. I watched as she coaxed out the chickens and then tried in vain to explain about chickens over the din.

When you want kids' attention, never put something more interesting than you in front of them. P.S. live animals are always more interesting.

They moved on, and I continued my work. Wilson was having hand issues, and apologized for not being able to help much. I assured him that his company and conversation was value enough.

Eventually the kids went with their teachers to have lunch, and Erica came over.

"I shouldn't be paid for today," Wilson said to her.

"Why?" she asked.

"His hand is bothering him," I said, working on the plants. "I told him his company was good enough, and he is helping some, that it's not a moral failure--

"CAN I PLEASE TALK TO HIM ALONE?" Erica snapped at me.

I stood there, stunned. Her normal voice is very quiet and I hadn't realized she'd started speaking to him.

Still, and not for the first time at this place, I thought, "Who the FUCK are you to speak to me that way?!?"

Instead, I stared at her for a few seconds, said, "Sure," and went back to my work. I checked the time, debated just walking off the job, but decided to make my money off her before leaving. It was my last day, after all.

I went into the barn, where the draft horses were cross-tied for the kids, calmed myself with some horse-nose smooching and neck scratching, and then went to harvest nettles at Penny's direction.

While harvesting by the fence, Erica came down.

"Is today your last day?

"Yes, it is."

"Oh, well thank you for everything. Those plants look good."

"You're welcome. Do you have enough?"

"I think so."

"OK. Well, I have friends who are interested in the workshops, so I'll likely be back."

Like hell.

"OK, well, I have to go pick some things up and I probably won't be back before you leave, so I wanted to thank you."

"OK, thank you too."

She left.

During the entire conversation I kept working and did not once look at her. The thing is, I'd really liked her, and I thought we got along. But when someone is that rude, it just says that this is the relationship the other person has always assumed; it just never played out until then.

As I left for the day, the young man who books the workshops said, You're in school, right? I never knew what for."

"Environmental Horticulture."

He looked stunned. "I never knew that."

I smiled wryly. "Why would you? After all, we have the benefit of a music major who took a permaculture workshop."

"Wow, I didn't know; that's really cool that your'e studying that."

"I think so. Take care."

Next week I work at a garden center where the people really like me. And for a new landscaper where the crew really likes me.

But no chickens, alas.

Ok, where the fuck was I.

Summer:

House sat, listening to the horrible sounds of karaoke night coming out of the local dive bar, having my eardrums assaulted by the parade of amplified motorcycle exhausts that made my fillings rattle each time they went by.

Preparing for final semester left of school (OK, technically, two classes left, but thanks to the completely effed-up healthcare situation, I'm taking three to qualify to buy the plan offered through the school, because the past year had been The Age of Decompensation. So a low-deductible plan it is.)

Also, I'm in an easily piss-poor mood. I realize it when it creeps out and gets loud. Someone said our city needed some good sports bars, and before I knew it I was off on a supercharged rant about how there's a fucking bar on every goddamn corner, and for once I'd like to find a place where the vegetarian "option" isn't a portobello mushroom "burger" or a hummus wrap , neither of which is worth leaving the house or tipping anyone for.

Mid-Summer:

 The woman I worked for has a world-class persecution complex, is virulently passive-aggressive, and can dole it out but can't take it, so when, after a few weeks of her abusive behavior and putting me in untenable situations such as overseeing the retired guy who is in landscaping as REHAB FROM A PACEMAKER IMPLANT and who, in addition to missing every third weed and making a huge mess everywhere, has decided that his former life in corporate translates into he doesn't have to take orders from me, I sent her a message basically saying, "hey, you're clearly unhappy, what can I do, because your impatience is difficult to manage," she decided to de-stress by sending me on jobs by myself while she trained other people and then canned my ass out of the blue. My reaction to this was twofold: 1. You card-carrying BITCH for letting me go mid-season, after I'd turned down an opportunity to work with another landscaper because I'd already committed to you, and now have to scramble to find work with no notice or severance, and 2. Hallelujah, I no longer have to put up with the abuse of a woman so in need of therapy I'd happily start a GoFundMe for it as a service to mankind.

My actual response to her was: "Thanks for letting me know. Here are my hours."

Because our work means our paths will cross again, and I'm not going to be the embarrassed one.

So. I ended up working seasonally at a restored farm that, among other things, grows and processes herbs. There's no clear business plan or structure, which drives me nuts, but it's low stress, which is a welcome change. So whenever my highly organized brain encounters seemingly nonsensical processes, I head to the garden and eat some sweet cicely or cherry tomatoes. Also there are chickens, and who hates that?

I'd had tea with the gardener I'd wanted to work for (but couldn't because I didn't want to leave Psycho Woman in the lurch OH THE BITTER IRONY) as a sort of informational interview, and when I lost my job, she, who had a full crew by then (like most everyone else, WHICH IS WHY IT'S SO SHITTY TO CAN SOMEONE IN JULY), looked out for me, and is now using me one day a week until season end. AND a classmate put me in touch with a garden center, where I auditioned today, and I guess they liked me (I was told I have "hustle"), so I'll be starting there, which gives a great opportunity to learn plants. The pay, like every other job, is poor, but on the bright side, it's not seasonal, so there's a chance it could go full time after I'm done with school, if I don't go back to landscaping, which is also a great learning opportunity.

I'm learning that you have so many more options when you don't expect any real money. It;s liberating in a sad way. I also need something regular and permanent so I can get a mortgage at some point, because by next summer I'm determined to have my own place with some freaking land where I can grow shit and practice canning, and keep my bees in my own yard, even if I have to move two hours away, which is likely. I want to own the place I'm going to die in. I want to unpack and never pack again. I want to put up shelves without thinking of resale value.

Now:

House was going on the market, so we had a massive clean-out, and I moved a bunch of big stuff to a storage locker and the rest to my uncle's. Yes -- I'm back with my uncle, who now has two cats, one of whom decided to editorialize on my three cats' presence by pissing everywhere. Buy stock in Nature's Miracle, folks.

My uncle doesn't like to clean the cat box, so his solution to his one (I know who it is; we lock eyes across rooms, and there's a silent acknowledgment that it is ON, motherfucker) cat's pissing/shitting out of the dirty box reaction was to buy puppy pads and put them around the box, upon which the cat pissed and shat and my uncle avoided dealing. (Parents, take note:this is what happens when an Italian mother babies her son until he's in his fifties: he keeps house like a bored 10-year old).So now I awake, feed my cats (who stay in my room at night), scoop the litterbox in the cellar and the one in my room, empty the dehumidifier in the cellar, wash cat dishes, and then start getting ready for work. While I'm doing this my uncle sits with the TV on at the usual "I won't admit I have severe hearing loss" volume, accompanied by the wheeing, clanging, cheering sounds of the Wheel of Fortune app on his tablet.

It's basically bedlam with cat piss.

Also I've never been so proud of my cats in my life. They are being friggin' PERFECT.

And in a weird way, living out of one room is also kind of liberating. I feel very den-like.

Queens of Tomatoes

One of our clients has a tennis court that's been converted into a raised-bed garden. I'm told the person who built it did so years ago. What I don't need to be told is that he had no idea how to design a raised-bed garden. The black ground cloth covering the entire court makes the place a furnace, and may of the beds are so huge you need to walk across them to plant, weed, and harvest.

You should not walk on raised beds; you compact the soil, which is a big no-no.

Compounding this, my boss, who is a beautiful landscape designer but not a food producer, had us plant things...well, sub-optimally. At the time she was really stressed, and when she gets stressed she gets dictatorial, so we shut our mouths and planted way too many plants in each bed.

Also, the garden needs regular and frequent tending, which is not happening, since we are fine gardeners, not vegetable gardeners, and our schedule is set accordingly.

The client uses the vegetables in her restaurant.

We have had a brutal drought and temperatures in the 90s, so watering has been an issue with watering bans, but that has at least been done enough to keep the plants going.

Today I stood with my usual colleague, Amy, looking at a dense forest of tomato plants.

"This is a mess," she said.

"Oh yeah."

"There are way too many plants here."

"And way too close together. Boss Lady admits now she planted too many."

"What are we supposed to do?"

"Fix it. And harvest what's ready."

"Did the client's chef say he wanted more stuff?"

"He has no choice, Look at this stuff. If we don't pick it today we'll lose it."

"I know; he was just such a jerk the last time I brought stuff."

"I'll handle him. Let's go."

We picked three big buckets of tomatoes, and had our other guy, a young pup, cut celery and put it into a cooler with some water. Amy explained end-blossom rot to him, and  why you need to remove rotten vegetables and cut leaves from the bed. Another colleague, a very nice middle-aged biker whom I suspect did way too much pot in the day, waters the garden, but just leaves rotten vegetables on the plants. He may be a bit lazy. Or clueless. (Last time, he and I cut lots of cabbage, and he was set to just dump them, loose, into the back of his pickup truck, to roll around in the bed on the way to the restaurant. I explained bruising and damage, and gave him a bin.)

Amy and I arrived at the restaurant, and carried the heavy cooler in first through the delivery entrance. The chef came over.

I put my hand on the cooler and opened my mouth.

Chef held up his hand.

"I have an event at Big Posh Place, and I have to have it ready by three, so I don't have time."

I waited until he was done, and continued.

"This is celery. It's getting woody but has a good flavor, and I thought you could use it for stock."

"Oh. Ha ha. 'stock.' I see what you did there."

"Yeah. and we'll bring in tomatoes and will leave them there."

On the way back to her truck, Amy said, "when he held up his hand, it was all I could do not to punch him. With his stupid hat."

"Yeah, I just ignore that crap and do what I set out to do. I don't accept his premise that his time is more important, because one, I don't work for him and two, we just spent an hour in 92-degree heat in a sea of plants so dense I thought I was in-country, picking tomatoes after spending an hour in 92-degree heat weeding and deadheading the property. Surprisingly, though, I'm not feeling the heat at all."

We headed for Dunkin' Donuts, which is our routine: after the first job of the day, we get our iced beverages, and Dunkies is everywhere.

We drive separate vehicles, and met in the parking lot.

"Is today 'Assholes Drive For Free' day?" I asked.

"Did you see me? I was all 'Thanks a lot, buddy! Thanks a lot!' to all the cars," Amy said.

"They were cutting me off mid-intersection! What the hell!!"

We looked at each other.

"Maybe I'm feeling the heat more than I realized," I suggested.

"Yeah. I need an iced coffee and a bathroom."

Still: better than any day in an office.

Music by the beach

In my city there's a free music concert by local musicians every week in a grassy park by the beach. My sister Jane and I like to walk, hear some music, and take in the cool of the evening. The bands are mostly local cover bands, and the crowd is a nice cross-section of the city, with a healthy dose of seniors and families with kids. And tattoos. It's a multicultural city, and not terribly wealthy. It all feels like the real world.

Tonight my sister and I scored a good spot on a bench, and were relaxing when the flies struck. Thanks to poison ivy looking like pretty much any other benign and generic ground cover, I'm covered in brutal oozing lesions. I have a steroid cream, and it works, but flies landing on my legs sets things to percolating, and I needed that dragon to stay asleep.

(Do NOT chime "leaves of three, let it be," to me. Do you know how many plants have leaves of three? And no it's not always shiny. It doesn't stand out AT all. Which is why every landscaper I've talked to has their poison ivy horror story. I freely confess I'd have no trouble taking a can of Roundup to the stuff. My legs look like tenderized meat.)

I saw a middle-aged woman on a blanket spraying herself and a young girl.

"Let's go," I said to my sister, and approached the woman.

"Is that bug spray?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Do you want to go to heaven for rescuing strangers in need?"

"Oh, help yourself! They say the bug [Zika] is only in Florida, but I'm not taking any chances, even though I'm not going to get pregnant!"

We thanked her profusely and sprayed ourselves.

Back on our bench, my sister commented on how she hadn't seen anyone she knew. My sister has worked at the same supermarket for 20+ years, so she's constantly bumping into people she knows. We make a game of it, with five people being the target number.

Three older women walked by.

"HI!" they said to Jane.

"Hi, how are you? We have to stop meeting like this," Jane replied. "This is my sister." It touches me that she loves to show me off.

They walked away, and Jane said, "The one in the floral shirt? The woman in white is her daughter. The other woman is another shopper."

"That's nice. They seem like very nice people."

 "She loves me. She thinks I'm adorable." Totally deadpan, statement of fact. She kills me.

We listened to music, I danced in my seat, we waved to passing babies and dogs, and had a lovely evening. And decided that next week it would be a picnic dinner on the grass.

Carpal Diem

The landscaper has been on vacation, and before that has used me maybe 4 hours a week, so I thought now would be a good time to have the carpal-tunnel surgery on my left hand. It was a basic repeat performance of the first one, including the anesthesiologist, a Chinese woman who had, the first time, woken me from a pre-surgical nap by grabbing and shaking my foot while calling out "MS C! MS C! WAKE UP!"in that voice that only Chinese women seem to be able to project, a hair-raising screech reserved for life-threatening emergencies and talking to friends sitting a foot away on the bus.

"Isn't that backwards?" I'd asked.

Can I just say: I'm one of those people who love hospitals. I love the clean sheets, warm blankets, the socks with rubber treads on them. I love being looked after. I love being wheeled into a bright clean white room and surrendering to the drugs and the oblivion.

My doctor, who is awesome, came by, marked the hand, and bim-bam-boom, I was out, then awake, my hand was numb and bandaged, and I was eating the most delicious saltines and cranberry juice of my life. Then home to lie on the couch, binge on Netflix, and doze for three hours at a time. It's the poor student's version of a day spa.

So of course the landscaper texted me to say she could use me all next week, and tomorrow.

"Sure! Great!" I'd texted back with my one un-bandaged hand. The bandage came off today, and I'll be working alone on the first job, so I won't have to worry about hiding any issues that come up.

Also, this time around I'm keeping the ibuprofen going, and the difference is remarkable.

Today I interviewed at a bakery cafe in Salem. They need part-time counter help, and with the assurance of someone I know who'd worked there that they are good people, I broke my 25+-year oath to never work in food service again, and met with them. I liked them enough, and I think they liked me.

"I can do math in my head," I offered.

"You won't have to, but OK," they said. They like that I keep bees, which I'm finding makes me somehow accessible and cool.

The plan is to have this as income when I go back to school. It's close, it's flexible, and I get free food on the job. I can work it along with the landscape work for now, so voila. I may have to give up most of my farm work, but I'm not being paid there. I'll do my best to help out, mostly because I really like them, especially the 84-year old mother-in-law who wears nylons on even the hottest days,and of course, the chickens.

Manual Labor summer

This summer was planned as the summer I did my internship hours as required by my class. As with many things in my life, I would have done it differently had I known better. The thing is, why is it that when I don't know better, my ignorance never benefits me? Why can't that coin toss be in my favor?

The landscaper I agreed to work for now has no work for me. I made $60 this week. I'd approached a farm to volunteer in exchange for exposure to how food is grown, and that's fine, because well, I only go when I want to, and it counts towards the internship. There are landscapers posting for openings, but thanks to raging Carpal Tunnel Syndrome that requires surgery, I won't be applying. I've had one hand done and need to have the other taken care of, and starting with a landscaper just before becoming useless is not good strategy.

The landscaping work has been fine, and I've learned a bit. And for all that it's hard, it's not stressful.  Our job sites are usually very large homes on extensive pieces of land. There is always some part of the land that serves as the place where we dump our clippings, pulled weeds, etc.

One particular property sits on its own hill. This means that when we are weeding along the extensive driveway and street frontage, we have to carry our full buckets up and over the hill, using rudimentary stone steps designed to lend atmosphere. At the top we then must cross to the back of the property, then down to a ledge where the barrels are emptied.

We were doing this a few days ago. It was hot. Very hot. When you work in landscaping, you have to wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts (I was already sporting a couple of patches where I'd hit some poison ivy). So it was hot, I was fully clothed,  and I was toiling up an almost vertical path with a full barrel on my shoulder. When I got to the dumping spot, I decided to make a "nitrogen donation," my clever private term for taking a pee (we can't use client bathrooms, nor would I want to), so I stepped carefully down the steep incline until I was below sight line of the house.

While doing my biz, I stumbled and managed to pee on myself. I righted myself, put myself back together, and went back to work. I thought about it. I was hot, sweaty, covered in dirt, my own urine drying on my leg, and at least two more trips waiting for me and the heavy barrel.

Still better than working in an office any day.