April 6, 2004
Growing from seed


In an ongoing effort to make sure every romanlily investor gets a top return on his/her dollar, I've been working like the dickens over the past few evenings on redesigning this site. Well, it really won't be a true redesign but instead more like a bandaid facelift. But I'll soon be eliminating the reading and cooking sections. This will probably make no difference to you since I've not updated either of those pages in months. But feel free to copy over those illicit recipes to your hard drive now, before they're gone forever!

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Today I directed a photo shoot at a small studio on the north side of town.

I should clarify what that means; it sounds like I was sitting in a canvas chair all day, wearing a beret cap and shouting into a megaphone at windblown models ("Come on, Shelley! Make me believe it!..."). No, we weren't taking pictures of people, but instead of "product." In this case, toys: rubber ducks, Lego robots, binoculars, jigsaw puzzles, footballs. Toys, toys, toys.

When I reached the studio this morning the photographer had a radio set up in the corner, quietly tuned to 107.5 FM, one of Atlanta's most tragic radio stations ("the new smooth jazz!..."). I decided to spare him one of my pretentious music fits and to just work diligently through the Dionne Warwick and Boney James.

The sort of work we were doing was somewhat tedious — setting up the props, arranging them just so, taking a shot, evaluating it on screen, making miniscule adjustments here and there, shooting it again. We plowed through each photo with minimal conversation, knocking out the shot list one by one.

Then at some point he stopped and said, "Do you like Sheryl Crow?"

I flinched for a moment — was I about to find myself trapped in a small studio with a relative stranger, forced to listen to Tuesday Night Music Club?

"Well," I said, "she's not one of my favorites. But I can tolerate her."

He paused and looked away. "I saw her bass player in the grocery store last night."

"Really? Tim Smith? Does he live around here?" I asked.

"Yeah, not too far," he said, waving a vague hand in the direction of what might have been the Smith neighborhood.

"My old roommate used to babysit for him and his wife!..." I said, suddenly all aflutter. "Did he have his hair done up all rock-star in the grocery store?"

"Yeah, he had some sort of weird style on it," Paul replied. We proceeded to discuss Tim Smith's hairstyle in great detail.

It never occurred to me until later how strange it was that both he and I knew the name of the bass player for Sheryl Crow. We had gone from 0 to 60 in about three seconds, breaking through the Great Wall of Diana Krall with a burst of cozy gossip about a very obscure musician whom neither of us have ever actually met.

Then, as quickly as it happened, it ended, and we settled back into work.

I wonder what Tim Smith ate for dinner tonight, and I wonder if he knew that two people he'll never meet were extremely interested in what he wears to the grocery store on a Monday night.

If you're out there, Tim, I just want to say that the people in Atlanta care about you and your hair. Let me know how you're doing.

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My friend Beth came over a couple of weeks ago to have lunch. We wanted to get caught up on each other's news. But when she arrived, she had a very distracting book in her hands called Grow Your Own Cut Flowers.

Lunch was quickly shelved in favor of an elaborate conversation about the glories of cutting flowers, and how to grow flowers from seeds. Beth and I are both nuts for gardening; what we lack in experience we make up for in enthusiasm. We pawed through the book like goldrush children with a Sears-Roebuck Catalog, cooing energetically at the snake's head fritillaria and lost angel dahlias.

Beth had just started her own little crop of seedlings at her home and with just a few words, she talked me in to planting some seeds. Before the day was over she had driven me to the nursery where we picked out two planting trays and a whole raft of flower and herb seeds.

At $1.49 a pack, I figured I could afford to splurge a bit on the seeds. I picked up seeds for Bells of Ireland, "Dancing Petticoats" cosmos daisies, thyme, oregano, oriental poppies, heirloom sweet peas, and more.

A couple of hours later, I had planted my first two flats of seeds. It was an extremely delicate operation, of course — handling a seed that is approximately the size of one-half of a freckle is best completed with a pair of very fine tweezers.

I was skeptical that anything would really happen with the seeds. I love flowers, but I have a mixed track record with the subtle care needed with very tender plants. I left the planting trays in a bright spot on the kitchen floor and watered them whenever I remembered.

Lo and behold, a few days later I came home from work and a peat pellet in the sunny tray had sprouted the tiniest bits of chartreuse fuzz. The fuzz was so small that I mistook it for a bit of green lint (really — what was I thinking?). I flicked it with my fingernail — and found that I had uprooted an actual shoot! I inspected the soil further and found a dozen similar flecks of microscopic green lint, so small that I could hardly believe that they had the wits about them to turn green and poke up through the peat. How did they know that it was time to come to life? How can something so vivid and alive as a flower come from something so tiny and useless as a seed?

This the time when I wish I had a digital camera so I could show you the pictures of the seedlings. I want to close in on them with a tight lens, capture their unspoiled green energy and save it for a later time when I need it. I can't help but feel weirdly inspired and encouraged when I come home at the end of the day and see them poking up bravely from of their mossy little beds.

Now begins the transition period of "hardening off" the seedlings and transplanting them to bigger containers. They are not quite ready for the big scary outdoors yet, which means that I'll have to hope my kitchen and my husband don't mind the fact that I'm converting part of our home into a temporary greenhouse.

I'm so invigorated by this experiment. If those seeds keep doing their thing, and I keep doing mine, this promises to be a wonderfully photogenic summer.