The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

Narrative & Memoir 51 to make my very own arrangement! They told me I was a natural. After a full day of learning everything about flowers that the ladies at Petals ‘N Posies Florist were willing to teach me, I went home with a fresh rose bouquet that I made myself, feeling very contented and excited about the whole thing. To make a long story short, I was asked to come back to the florist and help out during the holidays, because they needed an extra set of hands to make it through the holiday rush. I am now a seasonal employee at Petals ‘N Posies and have helped out there for four years. I am learning more and more about floral design and I get to make money while doing so. The next time that creative ability proved itself practical in my life was two years ago, at the outset of my employment at Susquehanna Orchards, a peach and apple orchard a few minutes frommy home in rural Pennsylvania.The sales barn, an old, massive barn full of fresh produce, is used as a retail location for the orchard. It was there that I would spendmany hours a week from July through the start of school, and then each Saturday through Thanksgiving. I would be sorting peaches, helping customers, answering the phone, emptying “rot-buckets,” and doing whatever else was necessary to keep the sales barn functioning like a well-oiled machine. In my first week, I noticed that almost all the price signs posted around the barn were hand-written. I wanted so much to make a sign— first, because it would give me a chance to sit down, and second, because the idea of a blank piece of paper and a container full of magic markers always gets me excited. I got the chance to make a sign and I proudly stapled it to a wall of the sales barn, colorfully informing the customers that our locally grown tomatoes were $1.50 per pound. A few hours later, the owner of the orchard came into the barn and noticed my sign. He suggested that I make all the necessary signs for the orchard going forward. Needless to say, I was thrilled. I had been given a chance to incorporate creativity into an otherwise potentially monotonous job, and my artwork, of sorts, would be posted all over the barn! Nevertheless, creativity’s most recent triumph in my life was in the form of an old piano bench, sandpaper, acrylic paints, a printed copy of an impressionist masterpiece, a lot of spare time, and a school Christmas concert. In my tenth grade art class, my teacher assigned each student an old wooden chair. My teacher, a thrifty, out-of-the-box thinker like myself, had procured the