A book Review: Rose City

The focus of her book is her stint as a greenhouse worker at Richmond famed Hill’s Roses (which, at one time, held the world’s largest collection of roses under glass, but is now, alas, gone). The job itself is a literal dead end, the kind of blue-collar work that pays you the same rate at the start of your first year as your twentieth. But Jean is not marking time working in the greenhouse, she is on a journey. One that takes her from a comfortable married life in Massachusetts to loving relationship here in the Midwest. On the way, we witness the destruction of 2 marriages, and the aftermath such a move leaves behind in a small community like Richmond, and even smaller group like Earlham College.

Jean does not hold back on the painful details. I always feel a little strange reading the non-fiction details of someone’s intimate life. I deal with divorce and “family restructuring” all the time in my professional life, but at work, its all legal analysis - details being shuffled to one category or the other, not reflection on the impact of these events on the people involved.

My feeling of unease were strong because I recognized many of the characters in this story: My college photography professor, who became her lover, the local attorney, married to an Earlham professor, hosting a gathering a faculty members that left Jean feeling “shunned,” and the Earlham professor who served as Jean’s college advisor, and who openly snubbed Jean in our local grocery store (Earlham, in general, is still very traditional when it comes to divorce).

But Jean is a true artist. She has a keen eye for detail, and brings much more meaning out of life in this small urban city than I have seen in the 20-odd years I have lived here. I liked her descriptions of work in the greenhouses. Having just come back from a trip to Pennsylvania where we spent a morning wondering around Longwood Garden’s extensive greenhouses, I found her description vivid. Her lover, now husband, is skilled with the camera, but Jean has the rare gift of photography by words. She is just as good an analyzing what she has seen:

That we can see the hours of life we spend at a job as a kind of currency that we are trading in exchange for something else: a paycheck, a position, perhaps some kind of power. Or, we can see those hours as life itself, what we are and what we are becoming.

I think anyone can enjoy this tale, but it will hold special meaning for those of us familiar with the city of Richmond.

Bottom line: Highly recommended.