From time to time in my life I have found it necessary to provide a curriculum vitae. The older I get and the longer I live on an island, this has become a laborious task requiring the use of flowery poetic license. Recently I almost sidestepped a course that I very much wanted to pursue only because enrollment required an “application” The effort seemed too daunting and too tedious.
If I filled out the blanks with the god’s honest truth, I fear I would present myself as a severely ADD (attention deficit disorder) bag lady with multiple personalities. Employment, and island life in general, requires you to find and/or create your niche, and that niche changes from season to season, year to year, and life phase to life phase.
In some ways though, the ADD-bag lady-multiple personality portrayal is true to my nature and defines the parameters of my work. I go nuts having to be indoors all day, yet sunburn like a melanoma poster child. I detest having to wear a uniform, let alone a bra and reasonable shoes. With four almost-adult kids my life entails enough drama and crisis to base a reality TV show on (not to mention the role of Mom), so I am not always as punctual as I would like to be. We live on an isolated little island in the summer (mud, tide, wind, and fog factors) and we move in and rent a different home on the big island every winter (new address, phone number, fluctuating amenities). Also, I find, the more “wise woman” I become, the less I play well with others…
Still, given those parameters, I am never short of work, and have even been going to school to complete a degree — just in case I ever want a normal job. My response to the proverbial question, “what do you DO?” is that I write, do home health care and hospice work, cater, work in restaurants, clean houses, prune apple trees, babysit, paint porches, clear land, and — one job I am just itching to get at come spring — I get to play in the dirt. I am a budding professional gardener and my cohorts in the field are some very cool women that I admire tremendously.
These women, for the most part, do not seem to have the ADD issues that I have. In fact, they are as focused as honey bees. They know their stuff and go at their vocations 12 months a year, 24/7, as best I can tell. They are in e-mail contact with their customers throughout the winter, attend garden shows, hone up on their Latin biology terms, pore over plant catalogs, and start their little seeds of hope in their greenhouses by January or February. In contrast, I am a johhny-come-lately laborer who tends to thrash and burn in the garden. My skills lie in cooking up compost, edging and pulling weeds. One dear elderly friend of mine once wrung her hands and demanded that I get OUT! of her garden, though I was trying to be helpful. She wailed, “You garden like you are cleaning house!”
I have worked as a grunt laborer for quite a few of the island’s talented landscapers and have had the honor of witnessing each of their styles. Their personal fortes and their unique touches are discernable from a distance. Lily makes magic with garden design, encouraging perennials to be perennial amongst inhospitable granite tailings. Carlita creates mosaics of variegated leafy vegetables, choosing varieties with names that read like poetry on their identifying stakes. Elderberry, has an “in” with the garden fairies, feeds her client’s gardens with seaweed and incantations, encouraging them to offer up their tantalizing scents and dewy faces. Each of them has a way, a touch, a methodology that flows over into their own overly-ambitious gardens and their overly-ambitious lives.
Not only do they inspire me, but they encourage me as well, having the blind faith to turn over a few of their smaller jobs to help get me started on my own. While I may lack their grace, I certainly share their love of watching things grow and mature and give off seeds that make new babies… I love the rhythm and the possibility and when I can shut up the chatter in my head long enough, I love what the plants and soil have to teach me. In this challenging, often-hostile New England environment, spring, summer, and fall are a miracle that this Florida-born girl never takes for granted.
These dirt divas I have mentioned are but a few members in the club. There are also Cheri and Carlotta, the rosy-cheeked ladies you see bouncing down the road on their tractors, rototilling pre-season and mowing the fields in fall. There are all of the new young bloods coming up with their own vim and vigor, and some managing large-scale production farms like it was nothing. And there are the lovely young nubiles that these mentors employ, with their flowing manes, halter tops and humus sandwiches packed for lunch. Young or old, they are a good looking bunch; strong, muscled, shades from ruddy red to coffee brown, vibrantly alive. They drive little pick-up trucks chock full of tools, wheelbarrows, bouquets of flowers, 50 empty coffee cups and water bottles. By the end of the long day — most have been going at it since sunrise — they catch each other at the post office or grocery store, looking beat with dirty nails and knees. If I do say so myself, they are a bunch of hotties in Carharts, and they make the islands bloom with beauty.
Karen Roberts Jackson lives on Green’s Island in summer, Vinalhaven in winter.