SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022
BITERS Conquering old habits and getting tough. Written by Annika Harley Illustrated by Zhijun Cheng
The garden center wasn’t much to look at, Meadow’s Farms, a small plot of land on the top of a hill, squished between a community church and Route 50. It wasn’t much more exciting to look at from the employee parking lot where I parked my creaky old minivan. And yet it was mine, my place of work for the foreseeable future. For a summer job, working at the garden center really wasn’t that bad. My coworkers were kind enough, mostly middle-aged men. Almost none of them had a college degree and pretty much all of them had a smoking problem. But they were still fun to work with, as they made a point not to take selling mulch and flowers too seriously. Having just graduated high school, I was by far the youngest person on staff, and one of the only women. I think that’s why Theresa took me under her wing. She was in her early fifties but looked well past sixty, her skin leathery and with a deep tan after so many years in the sun. A grandmother, she made
it well known to us all that she was “too damn old to be working at this dump.” This was usually followed with a short cackle and another drag from her cigarette. She was in charge of training me on the cash register where my job was to check out customer products as I sweat through my uniform in the cramped space behind the counter. People typically paid with credit or debit cards, so my job mostly consisted of the polite, “Did you find everything okay?” as they shuffled through their wallets and purses, sometimes offering me a smile. She would nod approvingly with every successful transaction and be quick to input the manager override when I made mistakes, shaking her head with a grin when I apologized profusely. When there were no customers in the store, we stocked empty shelves, answered phones, and filled out delivery and installation forms. We called it busy work, that time in the shop when the gossip was as abundant as the dust. Theresa
