Weeding for Growth. How a flower helped me Grow Up and Develop Roots

I was born in 1982. What that means is I was born before the big technological boom of computers, tablets, cell phones, and social media. In order to save memories, we either had to take photos, buy a souvenir as a visual memento, write about it, talk about it, or just save it in the old memory bank for recall in our later years.

Taking a photo back then was on film. I remember my first camera. It was red molded plastic, the size of a small box, with a firm handle on the side to advance the film. Depending on the size of the film, you could take anywhere from 10–20 photos, so you had to be selective about what you wanted to capture. Once your film was used up, the next step was to drop it off—or mail it—for processing. The wait time could be anywhere from days to weeks before you got your photos back and saw what you’d captured.

The process became easier when grocery stores, pharmacies, and small pop-up film processing booths started appearing, and turnaround times became shorter. Disposable cameras became the rage, and the collection of photo albums began stacking up.

As technology progressed, the camera was upgraded to a floppy disk, and the birth of digital photos and computer storage became the new normal. Progressive indeed! But the computer was not the safest place to store your precious images—or at least not for me. I’ve gone through dozens of computers. Most were lost to viruses, dead hard drives, or simply lost or stolen. With each computer lost, so were my photos.

The memories remain, though, and with them, little mementos of times well spent pop up here and there. I may not have many photos of my life during the dark era of the floppy disk, but I carry bright and bold images everywhere I go.

Last week, I got to spend time with my parents in New York. My mom has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and just underwent a life-changing surgery to remove both of her breasts. I value the opportunity to step away from the farm and spend time with both my mom and dad. I know they need help and support, and I do everything I can to be there for them. While visiting, I spent time outside playing with their two miniature dachshunds, Joey and Otis, and walking around their yard admiring their daylilies.

Seeing those daylilies in full bloom brought a rush of memories back to me.

I don’t know the exact years—maybe around 2005 to 2008—I responded to an ad in the local newspaper looking for help on a farm in Waterford, Maine: Deerwood Farm and Gardens. I called the number in the ad and set up a time to visit with the owner, Beverly Hendricks.

When I visited the farm for the first time, I was greeted by a short, ageless woman with a matched energy and youthfulness to my own. (I was in my early 20s; she was in her 60s.) When I say ageless, I mean it. Bev could run laps around a kid and seemingly never get tired. I arrived wearing my usual leather cowboy boots, and she eagerly showed me a pair of boots she owned and loved. A friendship was formed almost immediately.

I was selling real estate at the time but looking for extra income on the side, so this job was perfect. I loved being outdoors, wanted to learn more about gardening and farming, and she offered a work environment that allowed me to bring my dog, KC, to work with me. I think we agreed to $6 per hour, cash, for each hour spent in her flower garden pulling weeds.

Bluetooth speakers and earbuds weren’t really a “thing” at the time, so the sound of buzzing bees, whizzing flies, and chirping grasshoppers were my entertainment. I worked in isolation for the first couple of weeks since Bev was busy getting her gardens ready for the planting season. She would occasionally grab me from the flower rows to help her unroll hay from a round bale, push around some dirt, or dig up plants. While we worked together, we’d chat about current events and share stories from our pasts.

Bev had a fascinating life. She and her husband seemingly abandoned their urban world and moved their three kids to the middle of nowhere, Maine. The house was a fixer-upper cape-style home with an ell, a summer kitchen, a greenhouse, and a barn. It had the cutest charm, and I admired their home so much. Her kitchen always smelled of fresh herbs. Nothing about the house was modern—not even by mid-2000s standards. It was a time capsule of an era gone by. It was a farmhouse to its very core.

Our mornings started early, and I would arrive in my own car and meet Bev in her kitchen. NPR would always be playing on a plug-in radio, and there was always an offering of fresh-picked vegetables or bread to snack on. We’d discuss our plans for the day and then head out in opposite directions to tackle the endless chores. My job: pull weeds.

Deerwood Farm and Gardens had invested in a daylily farm from another town and had carefully replanted each bulb in large rows across an acre or more of flat farmland. She organized her rows with a base of dense black weed cloth and grouped the lilies by bloom time, color, size, and variety. Each row was labeled with a metal stake and a Sharpie-marked name. I was instructed to dig up and separate bulbs to transplant along the rows, pull weeds, and lay down a thick layer of hay to prevent more insidious weeds from returning.

Did the hay work? Kind of. I used to joke that if only crabgrass were edible or decorative, we would’ve made a killing selling it. Crabgrass wanted to thrive in every row, and my goal was to ensure its death and demise—not a task for the faint of heart.

Being outdoors without music, phones, or people changes you. It changed me. Bev and I liked to work barefoot. Rain, mud, bugs, grass, rocks—you name it. Our feet stayed an organic shade of brown for the years we worked together. Our skin tanned and aged from the sun. I’d tan so dark that we’d joke about how I was basically turning into a Latino. I was proud of the hard work. It gave me a new respect for the manual labor done by so many Latino immigrants in this country.

We worked through torrential downpours and giggled like kids, running through puddles and getting soaked to the bone. Despite our age difference, we were best friends when we were together. We shared secrets and stories and worked more and more side by side.

Once the flowers started blooming, the people started coming. The farm stand opened, and we would take orders or walk with customers as they picked their flowers. They’d pay by the bulb, and I’d carefully dig up each plant, separate the bulbs, and wrap them in a plastic bag in exchange for a few dollars. I loved my job. It was thrilling.

Words can’t describe what it felt like to see those plants bloom. When I started, they were nothing more than bundles of grass-like shoots. Soon, they grew tall, thick stems with little bulbs on the ends. As the sun climbed and the soil warmed, the rows came alive with color. Week after week, another row would awaken into an ocean of pinks, reds, yellows, and oranges.

I get emotional, still, after all these years, just recalling the feeling of being part of that.

As the flowers persisted in showing off their vibrancy and eagerness to thrive, I was going through a dark period in my personal life. I think the early 20s are a difficult time for any girl growing into a woman. I had been diagnosed with a degenerative reproductive disease and became a test subject for medications and surgeries that only seemed to worsen things. To top it off, I had a serious shoulder injury from a car accident in 2000, and I was in constant physical pain. Add to that a toxic relationship with a man who destroyed any sense of safety I had—I was a mess.

I needed that time among the flowers for personal reflection. I needed the color to brighten my darkness. I needed the silence to drown out the noise.

And I found that on Bev’s farm.

I found companionship with Bev, her husband Brian, and her kids. They took me in like family.

I have no photos. No tangible photo album, no digital folder to share those wondrous images. Just deeply ingrained memories and the skills that remain with me every day. I tend to those memories carefully. I cherish the heat, cold, rain, sunburns, bug bites, giggles, and the delicious tastes and smells of that time and place.

Walking around my parents’ house this past week, gazing at their daylilies in bloom, brought back intense emotion and reflection. I struggle to recall the flower varieties (I used to know all their names by heart), but the names are irrelevant. Each plant represents growth, maturity, destiny, and the very core of who I am today.

It’s no surprise I chose the path of farming. I wasn’t raised on a farm. I sought it out—or maybe it sought me. I developed roots deep in the soil, with a profound dedication to a lifelong tradition of hard work, perseverance, and growth.

Weeds? They’re just reminders to stay humble. Life is messy. Every once in a while, a devilish little crabgrass will try to root itself in your tidy row of color and vibrance. If you ignore it, it can take over. It can kill the flower. It can spread and spare nothing in its path.

But here’s the thing: you can pull it out.

You might have to take off your shoes, dig your toes into the soil, get down on your knees and hunch over, your back to the blazing sun, and pull—hard and steady. Yank that weed out, and celebrate the space you’ve created for your flowers to grow.

My life, so far, can be summed up by those flower rows.

Weeds of challenge, regret, pain, loss, and sadness pop up. They are relentless. But no matter how hard it is to weed them out, I keep tending to my garden of light, love, and the pursuit of happiness.