My Legs Stopped Working for a Month

The big leap didn’t start in Texas. It started at FarmGirl Flowers in San Francisco, making 150 bouquets a day against a clock.

Making bouquets for someone else isn’t farming, I know. But I wasn’t trying to farm yet. I was in San Francisco with my whole worldview coming undone, and I wanted my hands in flowers while it happened.

As luck would have it, a working flower company was based right there in my new city, and they were hiring.

If you’ve been around for a while, you know this about me. When I decide I want something, I go all the way in. I soak it up, take on the whole persona, rewrite who I am around it.

I knew even then that my DNA was rearranging. I’m generally good at things on the first try, and I have almost no patience for being bad at anything. This was the first thing in a long time I was willing to be bad at. And I was bad at it, for a while.

FarmGirl’s style is specific: a burlap-wrapped bouquet built flat so it settles into a shipping box, made fast, to a recipe, to a quota. New designers start on single-variety bunches and then move up to small bouquets, where the number to hit was 150 a day. Looking back, I could probably do 300 now. At the time, 150 nearly finished me.

I went home every day with aching in muscles I didn’t know I had. The real trial was the journey home, once I’d shoved my way out of a sardine-packed bus onto the streets of Chinatown and faced the one last hill between me and our apartment.

That hill nearly killed me some days. I was half convinced the elderly men playing mahjong in the park were going to have to step in, because my legs did not work for a solid month.

And I freakin’ loved it. Every screaming muscle, the one afternoon I cried in the bathroom, the boss-level hills, all of it. I was learning flower quality, design structure, how to move fast with my hands, how a real flower operation runs.

I made my first friends who knew me only as a flower person, and I’ll never forget them. On Fridays we’d finish early and spend the rest of the time folding together the flat cardboard shipping boxes, laughing and dancing.

Eight months earlier I’d been miserable, helping primary care clinics redesign their workflows. Important work, truly. But I cannot describe the freedom I felt wrapping burlap around flowers for a living.

The fog that had been sitting over me lifted the way it lifts over the San Francisco Bay in the afternoon, there all morning and then simply gone.

All the while, Peter and I were looking at land near Dallas, sending my parents on scouting trips armed with FaceTime. And a year almost to the day after I’d moved across the country to San Francisco, we found it.