Lady belonged to Maxine, a retired woman who would whistle for her to come home when she wandered down to visit me at my new garden. Thus I met Maxine. Thank you, Lady! Maxine had admired the garden I was creating and wanted me to come work in hers, a block away, for a few hours a week. (Years later when Lady was elderly and Maxine too elderly to care for her, we adopted Lady and she lived with us for two years till she passed on. That was my thank you to this sweet dog.)
The then-owners* of the resort where Robert and I lived and worked said they feared it would “dissipate my energy” to work elsewhere, but I said I needed the money rather desperately, so I took the job. Thus the garden that I created at the Sou’wester began to spring me into a gardening career, because through Maxine, I met her daughter, Jo, and the next year started to work in her garden also…
As the autumn wore on, a man named Randy came to work at the lodge to organize the paperwork and make it computerized. He moved into one of the small trailers and we got to be friends. He soon told us that he felt he was being asked to do way too much work for too little, and he left before long for Astoria, and strongly advised us to get out as well.
Meanwhile, I started running the resort office for two days a time, and was asked to reorganize the files. The owners must have forgotten that they had a file full of plaintive and sad letters from previous workers, and from artists who had done lodging trades with them, and who felt their hearts had been broken by loving the place and its owners and then being betrayed by deals gone bad. Very, very interesting, thought I, feeling increasingly the same way as promises of increased pay never materialized.
We went to visit Randy in Astoria and contemplated what it would be like to have our own lives again.
In the fall we met the then-owners of Shakti Cove Cottages in Ocean Park through their little restaurant in Long Beach. They wanted us to come live and work at their resort instead and offered much better terms. We were also being courted by a nursery owner who had just moved to the Peninsula (after staying at the resort and falling in love with the beach) who wanted us to get an RV and park it at her new place. And I did have that little gardening job with Maxine and wondered if perhaps I could get more jobs like that.
When the rains came, the roof in our carriage house apartment leaked horribly, so much so that we had to put a bowl on our bed between us to catch the water. The owners told Robert that they expected him to re-roof the carriage house as part of his job, on top of the other work he was doing. We both said this made no sense, as it was a huge job that would improve their building. We had no lease that guaranteed we could stay there. Our schedules were already full of work maintaining and cleaning the resort, with no extra time left over: 40 hours a week each for $500 a month and rental trade. We strongly felt that replacing the roof was a job that Robert should be paid for or credited in rental trade, and so we continued to live with the leak, and with wind whipping through the sides of the building.
Meanwhile, I planted bulbs and remained terribly attached to my new garden.
[…] could say our first two jobs were brought to us by dogs, because we had met Maxine through her dog Lady coming to visit us at the Sou’wester and we had met another Seaview friend, Bev Rolfe, […]
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[…] 1996, our good weekly client Maxine, my very first client on the Peninsula, had some trees removed in her driveway and we created for her a circle of […]
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[…] Long Beach, I still gardened for Jo, the daughter of Maxine who had given me my first gardening job on the Long Beach […]
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[…] is a garden I have admired and worked in for 19 years, and her mother, Maxine, was my first gardening client on the Peninsula and taught me useful things like how good it is to pinch back cosmos and godetia to make them […]
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[…] “Maxine’s white rambler”, from a cutting from Jo’s mom’s garden. […]
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