“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself” – Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
There is a calm in the mundane. College is hardly mundane. I’m not sure if any student really grasps a sense of peace during their four years at a university, except maybe during the summers – the long temperate period in between May and August where students are officially given free rein over what to do with their day to day.
Of course, the average student opts out of relishing in the long, slow days, many taking summer classes or preparing for their careers with internships. Then, of course, the elusive summer vacation which usually required more money than I had.
For most, the summer job is what fills hours of free time. I usually never had luck with summer classes, couldn’t find a sufficient internship and was too broke for a summer trip to Europe. So each summer break, the summer job looked me dead in the face and smacked me somewhere in between my eyes, usually right toward the end of finals week.
I was under the assumption that the summer job would send me right back down to my pit of stress and tiredness, a place reserved for the months of an academic year. Instead, after knocking me to the floor, it kindly helped me up and said “Steve, all you have to do is mow the lawns.”
I got a job at PLNU landscaping. My expectations weren’t high as I spent the summer before at home waiting tables, a job that was much too fast paced for me. The job offered free oceanfront housing in Young Residence Hall on top of the pay, which made it all the more enticing.
The first day rolled around and I quickly introduced myself to the crew, shaking hands with the full time workers and my new boss. I was friendly with most of the students, not needing to introduce myself. Our boss gave us our assignment for the day — picking up trash as students moved out — and I hopped in a cart with another student, fourth-year business major Will Freds.
The days rolled by, as the other students and I got the hang of the job. We shifted to lawn care, learning how to start a mower and properly trim a line of grass. Despite being on campus, school seemed like a distant friend, the only reminder of its existence being an email or text once in a while.
The other guys and I quickly grew fond of each other, teasing each other for miniscule mistakes on a lawn and learning about each other’s lives. Will and I became close friends. Usually we opted to drive the rusty blue GMC Sonoma together. I’d crank the radio and scan to 91.1 every morning. Then I would teach him about the dad rock I grew up on with varying rates of success.
Our boss, Randy Navarro, delighted in teaching us about horticulture. We listened attentively as he taught us about root systems, tree pruning and, of course, power equipment.
Never an early riser, I took harshly to the 7 a.m. start time at first. The fresh morning air, still dense with fog and dew, almost made me queasy, a feeling that was only cured by a steamy Keurig coffee from my dorm room. Gradually, as the days marched on, my new and improved circadian rhythm had me getting up before my alarm, and I basked in the calm, gray mornings.
The hardest part to articulate about the job is how the other students and I would get a chance to be boys again, before we eventually faced the reality of office jobs and corporate meetings. Each day, although simple and rather mundane, felt life-giving, in a way. Perhaps it was the sunshine glowing on our skin as the smell of freshly cut grass wafted through our noses down to our lungs. Or maybe it was the eight hours we spent in a flower bed of white crown daisies as we carefully picked out all of the dead buds.
Or perhaps it was this: one day, toward the end of our summer, Randy gave us a task to cut down all of the agapanthus flowers around school because they were about to die. The agapanthus produces a great purple bulb of flowers that droops over as it dies. Me and a few other students did so, filling the back of our pickup with the flowers. We all agreed, this felt wrong. Each snip of my pruners felt like a participation in a mass genocide of flowers.
At the end of our day we got to a bed of blooming white agapanthus, a color we had not yet come across. They looked angelic as they reflected the summer sun, some of them not even fully bloomed. I looked at everyone else, no one wanted to be the one to snip them clean. So we walked away, leaving the white agapanthus to exude their beauty onto each passerby. In a way, that was one of our last acts of youthful civil disobedience before we gave our lives to structure. The fear and uncertainty surrounding what comes after college was forgotten during that moment and my summer doing landscaping. The simplicity of working in nature allowed me to access a peace in the mundane, which I didn’t know was possible.
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Charis Johnston