#4 INTRODUCTIONS/ ( revised 7/22) "Nick Hudson, the second of the four"

"the rememberer"

“For him, it was the starting gun. The truck brakes released. The sudden push of air cracked open the morning chill. He grasped the worn steel handle, lifted it up and back and pulled it toward his body. The long high door to the trailer slowly opened riding along its creaking hinges. The rush of moist hot hit his wind weathered face.

It had been loaded and sealed six hundred miles and fourteen hours ago with the freshly dug and gathered trees and evergreens from the fertile valleys of Pennsylvania. Nick reached up and nested his fingers into the steel grooves of the trailer bed and pulled his body up to sit flat on the cold hard floor next to the bundles.

He stepped over the dark burlap and mud balls of glistened evergreens woven flat and stacked high inside this dark box. It was his ritual each year; to make his way over and higher to center of the trailer, to stand alone and to inhale that first breath.

Suddenly, the cold of the northern winter was gone. It was the wet freshly dug Pennsylvania mud, laced with the sweet aroma of evergreens.

Spring had come to Nick Hudson.”

Nick had devoted his entire working career to owning and operating garden stores and helping other owners with their places. He stumbled into the business by accident in the early 1970’s when looking for a small grocery store to buy. His early wanderlust had taken him to the tall timber of Montana, to the red clay of Georgia, to his bearded hippie days into the air of San Francisco tambourines and bong pipes.

The realtor ask Nick and his young wife; “do you know anything about gardening?” Nick knew nothing and could care even less about it. Sally, his wife, had gardened a little. He showed them a small grocery store/fruit stand for sale in town that also sold plants and garden supplies in the springtime. It was tiny and rundown but to Nick and Sally, the dream of possibilities stood before them.

He and Sally bought the tiny store in late summer. They nearly starved to death later that winter eating from the boxes and cans of food on the shelves. The first day and the first customer suspiciously looked up at Nick and said “I hope you are not one of those people who buys a store and knows nothing about it.”

From those early years when he and Sally slapped together old boards to make displays and moved little sprinklers around the plants, they built that little store, over the next twenty five years , into a large regional garden center, nursery and florist shop servicing a 100 mile radius. They continued to expand into “portable seasonal garden shops” in two states.. In the late 90’s They built a new garden center complex to service the expanding market. In early 2000,

Nick and Sally fell on hard times and overreached dreams. The creditors seized their lifetime of hard earned savings. Nick traveled throughout the United States for the next five years working at other garden centers. After living out of apartments and cardboard boxes, he gave up the struggle and rented a weathered one bedroom shack on the Texas gulf coast to be near his youngest son.

In the winter, he would camp out in his "Luxury Retirement Condo" on the beach in a little Mexican town facing the blue Caribbean. Sally had left him many years before and moved back to her parent’s dairy farm in Wisconsin.

Nick Hudson knew mostly all there is to know about the retail garden center industry. More importantly, Nick loved plants and plant care.

His face of sixty years was furrowed now from decades of springtimes gazing into the frigid dawn morning light, standing and staring, guarding the tender plants from the scourge of frost and the loss of everything in their struggle for financial survival.

He walked slightly bent now from packing hundred pound sacks of seed potatoes back and forth from the cooling shed into the hot early summer heat.

Oh yes, he knew mostly all about this life with plants and gardeners