A Nursery Tale
A sunny day in spring, the air redolent of fragrant promise. Blue sky overhead put me into the mood to buy a new lilac shrub for the yard, so I drove down the mountain to the nursery. The way I was feeling that day, it was either buy a new lilac or go look for ghosts in an old cemetery. I don’t know what the connection is here—between lilacs and ghosts—so I’m just going to chalk it up as one of life’s little mysteries. Maybe things like this happen to you too. Maybe you have fallen in love with the wrong person. Maybe you have lost somebody dear. Maybe you have suffered something that can’t be framed in words. What’s a ghost anyway? I don’t know.
In any case, I arrived at the nursery and picked out a beautiful purple lilac. It was in bloom. I lifted the plastic container, placed it on a fancy flatbed shopping trolley, and started pulling it along the garden path. I’m no gardener but right then I felt like one.
Alas, that joy soon faded. I towed the trolley with my beautiful lilac all around the expansive nursery—past flowering plums, budding azaleas, and slumbering dogwoods—looking for the checkout stand, to pay and be on my way. I couldn’t find it. I felt like such a garden rookie.
After much wheeling around, I spotted a building with a stream of customers heading inside towing their own trolleys. This could be the place, but I wasn’t sure. I parked my trolley by some young magnolias in bloom and went in the building to check things out.
The air in there was muggy with verdure, fertilizer, and pesticides. I beheld a long line of green-thumb consumers, each of their trolleys laden with luxurious blossoms and foliage. It was a moveable Eden wending its way toward a single cashier stand—only this Eden was stalled. The line wasn’t moving and wouldn’t be anytime soon. For me it became a primal scene, evoking images of tollbooths and angry drivers along the Garden State Parkway. I began to wonder if the cemetery might not have been a better choice. Before I could turn and flee, a voice from behind growled: “Are you the line?”
I turned and saw a stout, middle-aged man with a diminutive mustache, glaring. He was sporting a railroad engineer hat and pulling an overladen trolley of pansies and forget-me-nots.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Is this the line for the checkout?”
“Yes,” he said, “this is the line for the checkout.” He was mimicking me. Then with a mock-magnanimous sweep of his arm, he added: “And it forms right behind me.”
Such unexpected rudeness! I was at a loss for words, which is rare enough I suppose, so I looked at his flowers for any insight they might offer as to his irritable disposition. Maybe his mother sent him here to procure some brief beauty for their drab home. Maybe he was buying flowers for the grave of his beloved. Or maybe his rancor had no root at all, just a tumbleweed of nastiness rolling across the desiccated plain of his days. I don’t know. Another mystery.
“Okay,” I said, and walked back outside to my trolley.
What to do now? I didn’t want to go back in there with my beautiful lilac and risk its wilting, so I opted to wait outside among the lavish blooms of the young magnolias while the nasty man and his trolley-load of unfortunate flowers made their slow way toward the cashier.
I must have had a look of quiet desperation on my face, because one of the nursery workers spotted me and came over, smiling broadly, and asked if I needed any help. I told him all I wanted to do was pay for my lilac and go home and plant it.
“I can help you with that!” he said. He pulled out an electronic device and scanned the price tag on the lilac and then my credit card. Transaction complete. Then he said: “That’s a beautiful lilac you got there.”
“Oh thank you!”
I headed home. As soon as I got there, I dug a hole and planted the beautiful lilac in the receiving earth.
©John P. O’Grady
Originally appeared in The Mountain Eagle on April 23, 2021
