Plants, Paint, and Patience
My first paying job was a brief summer stint as a sort of gardener. I say “sort of” because I now know what real gardeners do and what I did was mostly not garden. It was my grandparents’ year to maintain the grassy median on their cul-desac and they needed someone to mow it and wage an ongoing battle with gophers that kept undermining a brick retaining wall. Taking breaks I’d sneak onto the adjacent golf course and marvel at its unlikely expanse of green. But it was the wild in-between spaces that drew me. A mess of fallen trees in the graveyard next door that nobody ever visited but where all the birds hung out and the gophers went to play. At the end of the summer, I ended…
