The pattern became routine. She found home repair items at a Home Depot and appliances at Sears. She spotted the nearest Jiffy Lube to get her car serviced and a Nordstroms close by for clothing. She got her double latte at a Starbucks each morning and perused the aisles of Barnes and Noble for the bestsellers.
The pattern was simple except for this little longing in her life: her need for gardening. Just a pot on the deck railing would do.
There were times when Sarah was delighted and surprised at the garden store she discovered in those towns.. Sometimes, there were the big “destination” garden centers. Sadly, however, the owners had strayed from the love of plants to the love of business. They had pushed the lawn food to the back and stuck patio furniture and barbecues up front. They shoved out the fertilizers for candle displays.
Gardeners walking through the doors weaved passed silverware and wine decanters, around the dish and place settings, over the outdoor rugs to a tiny display of bug sprays stuffed into a back corner. Impeccable color coordinated coiffed “sales associates” were ready to match the love seat cushions to your “outdoor space” but they stood blank unable to explain the difference between an aphid and an apricot.
Soon, these big garden centers looked like thousands of other “home” stores. For a time, it worked. Sales increased and new shoppers filled the parking lots. For a few, this change continues to be very successful. But in time, many lost the gardener.
These “leisure stores” put themselves in direct hard nose competition with the big boxes, the “category killers” and regional businesses who could offer better service and better pricing. It was not long when the “outdoor leisure” customers caught on to this and the parking lot started to empty.
Mostly, though it was the same….
There was always the question, the hunt and the disappointment. “Do you have a gardening store in town?” She watch the blank look come over the face of the clerk. “Oh yes we do, there is a Home Depot down about ten blocks”.
Sarah had found the Home Depot garden departments many times before in these towns and it was usually a mess, loaded with the sameness of plants screaming to be watered. “
No, she would say, I mean a local garden store?”. There would be silence, then the scurrying for information from the other clerks. “Well, I think there is one but I have never been there.”
Sarah would drive to it, the crumpled paper with the clerk’s directions by her side. The place would end up in a sad part of town on a secondary lot behind other old stores. A hand painted chipped portable reader sign with broken, missing letters announcing the arrival. An open gate hanging precariously from the hinges and a huge logging chain and padlock dangling from the rusted support pipe.
Sarah turned in and stopped between the faint parking lines that had been sprayed painted on the dirt some years back. Two large dogs greeted her, licking and barking at her heels. Her leather shoes sank into wet mud from a small sprinkler that was overshooting the plants and pooling into the parking lot. It was a spring May morning and there were three other cars in the lot.
The door to the garden store was wooden, scarred and blackened. A faded half torn Master Charge sign stuck on the window. The hours were written on cardboard and taped to the door. “open 8-4, closed Sundays” with the words added in small letters “closed if the weather is bad” and warned, “cash only”
Sarah stepped inside and was hit by the strong suffocating odor of chemicals. There were wooden shelves with dusty bottles of insecticides. The ceiling was covered with dozens of shop worn wind chimes. A display of plastic pink flamingos stood in the corner surrounding a concrete fountain that was dry with a pump that was gurgling in agony.
Another corner had a bunch of faded artificial flowers and a wooden box holding candles with the peeling cellophane wrappers melded into the wax. An old fan moved back and forth from the counter. The register was brown from the dust. A hand scrawled sign said “in the back.”
The store was empty. A storm door with a broken glass that was duct taped led to a greenhouse lean-to pushed against the garden shop building. Sarah opened the storm door and walked up worn wooden planks to a higher level of the lean-to. A wheelbarrow that had been converted to a carrying cart stood in her path tipped sideways with a flat tire. In the distance she heard the scratchy sounds of a portable radio and someone watering.
There were rows of overgrown plants on benches with signs that offered a special price when purchased by the flat. The walkways between the benches of flowers were rough and bumpy from left over concrete that had been hand poured hurriedly troweled over years. There was fly paper and dead flies hanging on to the sticky suspended from wires above her.
She continued through the greenhouse lean-to to the back of the property. There was a stack of rain soaked, faded cardboard boxes piled high against an outside wall. Several rows of shrubs for sale were sitting on black plastic to keep the weeds down. The plastic sheets had become loose at the corners and were flapping in the wind, with grass that had found its way though the holes sheets, now higher than the shrubs.
A leaky garden hose shot spray into the air preventing Sarah from going down the row of shrubs. There was a collection of concrete fountains and statuary in the distance that had been left out in the winter with the bowls cracked and concrete sloughing off. Near the end of the shrubs was a cluster of rose bushes for sale that were growing in cardboard boxes. Sarah spotted one that she wanted and reached down to pick it up only to find that the roots had anchored hard into ground below. She pushed her fingers under the box, interlaced her hands and pulled hard to release the box from the soil below. The sign said “half price.” The cardboard box fell apart.
There was a tree selection. They were in plastic black cans and rusty metal egg containers tied to a chain link fence. A sign secured to the fence with bailing twine read, “We sell Monrovia quality plants”. There was a coffee can on the ground overflowing with brown water and tan cigarette butts.
Bill and Ann Norton owned and operated the place.
Bill’s dad and mom started it in the 50’s. Bill went off to college for a career in engineering, but when his dad got sick, he had to quit school and come home to run it. He married Ann the next year and she took the chair for the next twenty years transplanting seedlings into pots, kinda like making big rocks out of little rocks.
Bill hated the garden store and his life he was forced take. He barked back at the customers and their questions. Ann was silent, a lit Marlboro 100 dangling from her lips. She quietly moved the dirt around the newly planted seedlings.
Sarah quickly gathered some of few remaining flowers that were not overgrown or starving for water, paid a little boy who had stepped in front of the cash register, started her car and drove back out through the rickety gates and onto the street.
This garden store industry was confusing for Sarah. She had questions. She needed answers. She had an idea rattling in her head.
Maybe this early morning flight to the
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