November, 2018 - Chicago

I'm spending an afternoon between jobs writing next to one of my favorite windows in Logan Square. Yellow leaves are blowing sideways, and the plants in the patio planters have grown long and trailing, with the months of summer sun still coursing through their little plant veins. I feel like someone should tell them about their quickly approaching demise. Fall in Chicago, the slow descent into death.




A few years ago I got hit by a truck. It was a something like a Ford F-150; all I can remember is the grill. I walked away from this collision, very very slowly, after a brief and dazed visit to the hospital. I slept with a heating pad for months, rotating it around my entire body through the night. I began to slip into a foggy state of confusion and hopelessness after my run-in with two tons of metal not stopping, and at the encouragement of my newly live-in boyfriend, I got a job at a garden center.
 
As I searched for meaning in my life after this close call, I became obsessed with death. I was quietly walking around my life, wondering how exactly was it that I had bounced off of the truck. How do some people end up under the truck? What would have had to happen for me to go under? Would I have died then? And constantly, is my brain okay? Am I okay?

At the time I worked three days a week at two hospitals, offering up arts and crafts projects for people of all ages, living with cancer. There was a gnawing, Why am I okay? Why am I okay when these people aren't? And, more importantly, Why am I so sad when I'm the one that walks out of the hospital at the end of the day? 
 
I experienced a very deep guilt for not being able muster the mindset to be absolutely ecstatic about living. Isn't that what is supposed to happen when you face death and live?
 
So, I showed up on my first day at Sprout, optimistic and open, in the bright autumn sunshine, to work my new happy plant job. Within the first hour of wandering through the yard, casually chatting with the girl who's job I was taking, it became very clear to me that it was to be my job, for the rest of the outdoor season, to help the plants die.
 
You better believe that I made this my fucking job. I put so much love and tenderness into those little green souls. I pruned and picked off all the dead leaves. I put the flowering plants in the front, and rearranged them constantly. I chatted all the plant shoppers' ears off, hoping that someone would take home these perennials and love them through the upcoming Chicago winter. The temperature dropped before Thanksgiving and we created a wall with all the trees and shrubs. We pushed them tightly together into a giant mass, against the back garden fence and covered them with leaves and straw, and eventually with Christmas tree branches. I was literally burying them in their death bed.
That was the fall I learned to respect the seasons; of the year, and of life.



 



In Chicago, it's starting to feel like we're getting in deep. Plants are dying, birds are leaving, the ground feels like it's already got the shivers. I caught myself explaining to my two year old son why the leaves are falling off the trees, telling him that all the death needs to happen for the Earth to keep being reborn.  And, I've been ruminating on all the ways in which I will get through, yet another, Chicago Winter.