Nick Hudson remembers the old days when all the family got out there each spring to sell trees and shrubs. The handshake was the contract. The cash register was the pocket.
It was a sunny warm July day on a busy street in Spokane, Washington. Two empty wooden apple boxes rested on the sidewalk. The words were scrawled on a piece of cardboard nailed to the boxes;
CLOSED
everything is gone
open next year
thanks
Frank Denardo and his family had been on this street corner for forty years. Frank opened the place as a fruit stand in the late forties. His son, Frank, Jr. who grew up in the business had the place now. Now, Jr's sons, Louie and Donovan and their kids help with the spring planting craziness.
Frank Sr. would come down each May morning, sit in his chair, bang his cane on the floor and bellow out to his grand kids that the plants were dry or the weeds needed pulling. That's about all the old man could do anymore.
The fruit stand had not changed much. On frosty March mornings, when the Denardos were unloading the trucks, the oil barrel stove popped and whistled with hand split chunks of dry tamarack wood. When the heat of July came, they would roll up all the big garage doors. Now that they quit selling fresh fruit, that didn't matter anymore. the place was locked up before the hot months.
Old Frank and Jr. got into this big fight over the fruit a couple of years ago, throwing old crates at each other. “God damned it boy, you are going to ruin this place", the old man would shout. The kid finally convinced his Dad that selling fruit was just “trading dollars”. It was too much work to come home with nothing but a lot of aching bones.
Old Frank knew it but he just couldn't stand the thought of not selling boxes of fresh cots and peaches from the orchards of the Yakima valley. He had made a lot of friends over the years in those places. He belonged there, sampling the cherries as they came off the trees, taking a little “nip” now and then with the farmers as they walked the rows.
There was a new generation in Spokane. Nobody canned anymore. Old Frank raised his kids on those tree ripened Bartlett Pears. A few grey haired ladies buying a couple of Gravenstein Apples would not get his boys and the grand kids through the cold Spokane winters.
Jr. saw that the money was in shrubs and trees and flowers. When his sons unlocked the gate for the first time in March, Moms and their kids would swarmed the place gathering up all the blooming primroses and pansies leaving the wooden racks bare.
Young Frank set a little table up in the old fruit cooler with a bunch of cut butcher paper and some crayons. He got Donovan’s little girls to draw the letters and the prices. “Pansies 69 cents” and pin them near the flats of flowers.
Oh yeah, Young Frank knew what they wanted. When he would load up at the greenhouses at dawn, he would piss the growers off by demanding “everything in color”. Color is what emptied his racks every day. Color is what his customers wanted.
Frank Jr. and his two uncles drove the trucks each spring. The three of them would sit around the kitchen table as the sun dropped low over the shrub farmer's fields in Oregon. They would tear off chunks of Italian Ciabatta bread and throw hundred dollar bills until the farmer finished dressing his piece with warm garlic butter. He took a bite, look up at the pile and grunt “that’s enough”. The field of three thousand evergreens was theirs to dig, load and drive them home.
Sometimes the farmer would bring out the book, the printed price list for his evergreens. Jr. would say “if you bring out the book, I’m outta here”. Frank Jr. liked the way his old man did it with hundred dollar bills over the laughter of the Italian farmer and his family and the sweet aroma of fresh pasta and sauce. Jr. stayed until the last evergreen was packed neatly in the trucks.
The uncles drove the four hundred miles to Spokane, unloaded and turned the truck around for Oregon again, “watchin the white lines” mile after mile until it the season ended. There were no displays or signs. They just opened the doors and sold them right out of the truck until the last evergreen was gone.
Each season, it ended and fast as it began. The flowers were tucked into the customer's flower boxes; the shrubs were planted in their beds. The last car drove out of their gate. Old Frank and Jr. turned off the lights, locked the door and pinned the cardboard sign to the apple boxes.
CLOSED
everything is gone
open next year
thanks
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