My earliest memories are of living with my mom at my grandparents' house. I later learned that it was during the War.
Today, we are bombarded with every known or imagined risk to children, and yet we hear nothing about the dangers of exposing the very young to greenhouses.
So it was that I was allowed to go next door to Mr. G's greenhouse, where I believe I was exposed to greenhouse microbes, some the size of BB's, that were to infect me all of my life.
Mr. and Mrs. Glascock were our elderly neighbors. He made his living growing things. I don't remember much about her, because she was indoors a lot, perhaps cooking. She was nice, too.
Years later, my Grandma Belle told me that she would come to fetch me and find me quite naked, a little blue-eyed, towheaded Child of Nature playing in the greenhouse. It was warm in there, with the moist air smelling of peat and sawdust. Clothes served no function at all.
Perhaps Mr. G regarded me like a stray cat that followed him around. He busied himself with filling little pots with soil, his old brown hands sounding dry against the clay.
This was no hobby greenhouse. It was magnificent. There were long cement tables for the pots of flowers. The sawdust aisles felt so good on my bare feet.
I don't remember the naked episodes, but I do recall, when I must have been a bit older, he let me turn the huge wheel to crank the roof glass vents open.
Sitting on a stool in the small cellar adjoining the house, I watched him make sprays of roses. He wrapped them with wires and green tape, while he smoked his pipe. We didn't speak much. Then he put the exquisite floral arrangements in his old gray panel truck, probably to deliver them to funeral homes.
After such a childhood, all hope fled for me to accept a normal, greenhouseless life.
Oh, sure, I grow plants under lights, but the longing won't leave me for a tropical shelter where I can go in February and start the growing season. It's an incurable condition. Those blessed microbes!
