Homes on the Move was a popular prime time home improvement show, featuring a perky, perfect blonde host named Candy. After the big reveal, the transformed homes were always to die for. The dire predicaments of the homeowners were heart wrenching.
“Yeah, my friends and I make a drinking game out of it,” she quipped, sure that the irony in her voice would convey the sheer absurdity of the lie.
However, the part of Homes on the Move that secretly got her heart thumping was the last segment before the renovation was complete. This was when the tired and worn landscape was reborn. She always tried not to recognize Max as he transformed the landscape with his “Ivy League” touches, and just imagine that he was just any old actor. This was easily achieved, as she was so engrossed in the renovation projects. However, she was mostly shocked at how little concern Max had for sustainability, keeping maintenance low, and other current themes in landscape design.
“I really dig that!” replied Max, who was finally feeling like he was back in “the zone” and not being kicked off some sort of reality show. She had treated him like a loser, but now he was back on top. Homes on the Move would make a great drinking game. “So,” he asked in a seductive voice, “every time I take off my shirt…you do what?”
“I retch,” she wanted to say, but it would sound immature. She searched for an appropriate response to his Neanderthal-like comment.
“I take out my rosary beads and start praying for the environment,” she quipped. This is it. She was hoping that this would be the end of their meeting, the end of his involvement in the garden project for Jimmy and Charlene, and that she could go to a desert island, sit out in the sun, and sip from daiquiri glasses with little umbrellas in them. He didn’t even realize the value of using native greenery!
By this point, a frustrated Max was willing to say or do just about anything to get Isabella to rescind her hold on this project and to let him finish it in peace. As a looker, she was all that and a bag of chips. But, as a partner on a design project, she was way too uptight. A plan quickly formed in his mind. A career landscaper like Isabella would be too busy in the summer to leave for the shore at the last minute; she probably went from paycheck to paycheck by the look of her clothes and her shoes, which were quite shabby. She needed the income from her job, and she needed to leave him alone.
“Oh, I just realized, if we are going to work together on this project, you’ll need to come out to Long Beach Island for about a week. There’s plenty of extra room at the old family compound. I’m spending a week around here to appease the parents, and then it is off to LBI. We would need a whole week or so there to get these disagreements worked out,” Max contended. He waited sheepishly for the expected response. Gosh, he really could be clever, he assured himself gleefully.
Isabella had been putting off taking some warm-season vacation time for several years now. She usually had a lot of downtime during the winter, since they didn’t get many calls for tree work until the spring. The idea of a beach, especially a very exclusive one, and luxurious lodging, was particularly appealing. Besides, being the boss’ daughter had its perks. When it came time to ask for a scheduling favor, she had a life-long connection with the management.
The waitress cleared the coffee cups, and took a big long look at Max, practically devouring him with her eyes.
“Absolutely,” said Isabella. “I’ll get all my notes together and finish examining the site. When do we leave?” she asked. Enjoying the startled look on Max’s face, she realized that it was quite fun to see him squirm.
Yeah, Isabella realized, spending time with that Ivy guy wasn’t going to be too bad, as long as he allows her do the garden planning. If they steered clear of their high-jinxed past, and concentrated on the project, everything will be fine. She recalled how he had tripped her in the cafeteria and she almost dropped her tray of spaghetti all over the floor, and she shuddered. And, high school wasn’t even the half of it. The Ivy family had been bullying her family for generations, since the exalted Ivys her dad and grandfather worked for thought of gardeners as second-class citizens. What ever got Max into the plant world, anyway, she wondered?
Chapter 4 - Bad Blood Between the Albero and Ivy Families
“Never judge a book by its cover or a spring bulb by its smell.”
Professional Gardener Dan to his daughter, Isabella
“Look, you live in a town as long as I have, you know things about people,” said Dan, still trying to understand why his daughter didn’t enjoy the landscape renovation dream project she was undertaking.
Remembering how kind Mrs. Camille Ivy had been during his wife’s terminal illness, Dan recalled a very caring matriarch. She had been very flexible and toned down her demands on his time at the estate, looking the other way when a few of the weekly tasks were left undone. “If Max is anything like his mother, he’s a fine young man. He comes from good stock.”
“Good stock, Dad? They fired you and sent us out in the middle of a hot afternoon without any place to live and we had to scramble to find an apartment, and you were stuck inside that…”
“That was his father. Alexander Ivy was always looking for a way to get rid of me. When that $500 dollars went missing, it was reason enough to get the ‘gardener who thought he was above his place’ out of there,” he said. Plus, Dan thought, Mr. Ivy was miffed that Max, for whom he had high aspirations in the business world, was so interested in listening to the old gardener describe how to prune bushes and the proper combination of soil amendments for a good planting hole. But Dan thought better of sharing his memories of Max with is daughter. He was always rather sure that it was Max who had pilfered the $500 from his dad, and he didn’t want to sour his daughter on her new partner for this project. Besides, there were other things that had happened back then that he didn’t want to have her getting into. Lots of memories, good and bad, were buried at the estate.
“Well, I was happy to move on at the time, anyway,” admitted Dan. “I know you loved the carriage house, and it was really cute in its own way, but I was itching to start my own landscape company. You know that, right Pumpkin? We wouldn’t be where we are today, as a company and as a family, if we stayed on the estate.”
“Dad, you talk about it like it was a plantation or a reservation or something, it was really nice. I remember the ponies…”
“And, do you remember that old man Ivy wouldn’t let you play with the other kids, or even take the bus with them to school, because he didn’t want anyone to think that you were a part of that family?” Dan countered.
“I didn’t want you growing up thinking of yourself merely as ‘the help’ and I wanted to get into the landscaping business as more than a mere gardener. Now, I own my own company and you, my darling daughter, are my best employee. And because of your dedication to this company, you have earned some vacation time that is long overdue. Please, take Max up on his idea for you to go to Long Beach Island for a week so that you can complete the garden plans.”
“I remember when Harrison first bought that place. It is like a miniature White House on the sand, right off the beach, and you can see the bay and the beachfront. I never was there myself, but Cook would give us the scoop every Monday when they returned from their weekend excursions. It will give me peace to know that my daughter is there as a peer, as an invited guest, and not as part of the staff. Makes me feel like everything I’ve planted all these years is yielding great fruit, okay?”
“Sure Dad,” replied Isabella, “But just so we’re clear - Max is a real knucklehead, just like he always was in high school.”
“Just never judge a book by its cover is all I’m saying,” said Dan, as he reached over to point to the new herb seedlings they had painstakingly grown from seeds in their greenhouse. “Pumpkin, be sure to water those transplants with the chamomile tea and fish emulsion I mixed up over there. It will prevent them from dampening off.”
Chapter 5 - Sharon Rose’s Dying Wish
“True love waits; pro
mise me you will, too?”
Sharon Rose Albero to her daughter, Isabella, on her deathbed, 1989
Isabella had seen her mother lose weight rapidly, decline in energy and vitality, and become a shell of her former self, all in a matter of months. Cancer, in all of its manifestations, is a cruel and vicious opponent.
At twelve, Isabella was a budding beauty, but she was also very shy and socially awkward. She felt much more comfortable pruning a rose bush than talking to the popular kids at her middle school. Seeing her mother’s decline had been a real shock to her, and she was not completely able to accept or absorb what was happening. Her father, Dan, was her rock through the whole ordeal.
As her mother beckoned her to the sickbed with a wave, a very imploring expression came to Sharon Rose Albero’s eyes. She said, “Look at me. Look at me. Please. Wait. Promise to wait.”
“Wait for what, Mom? Mom, please tell me what I am supposed to wait for.” Isabella had tears in her eyes as she tried to gather the gist of this important promise.
Dan whispered in his daughter’s ear, “Say yes, Pumpkin.”
“Yes, Mama, I’ll wait.”
“True love waits,” Sharon Rose explained, and then she left for the next world.
Despite the devastating loss of her mother at such a tender age, Isabella stayed strong. She wanted to be brave, she didn’t cry any more. She kept her feelings bottled up inside and soldiered on. On the topic of “the promise,” Isabella had every intention of waiting for whatever it was that her mother was asking of her.
Dan considered explaining it fully to the twelve-year-old Isabella, but he waited until she was 16 to have “the talk.”
As Isabella grew into young adulthood, the immensity of that promise revealed itself.
Chapter 6 - More is Lost
“Someday you can become a U.S. senator, but not one of those mediocre state senators - you are from old money.”
Harrison Alexander Ivy to his grandson, Max, upon his high school graduation
It was 1990, and Isabella walked home from the camp at the township playground, where she was a junior counselor. She wanted to tell her father about a particularly difficult camper, as Dan was always able to help her problem-solve.
Instead of finding her dad, however, she found the disheveled son of the mansion invading her turf, her inner sanctum.
It was not the first time that Isabella had seen Max at the garden shed, but she was curious as to why he was sitting down on the ground, instead of a chair, and then she got closer, and quickly saw why. Frat boy knucklehead was totally trashed! He started banging his head against the wall and saying over and again, “It can’t be true, it can’t be,” and he seemed not at all in control of himself.
Isabella soon forgot why she had gone out to the shed, probably to tell her dad about something. She quickly went back to the carriage house, and only 20 minutes later was told that she needed to pack up all of her earthly possessions, as it was time to move on.
Her dad was not talking or saying anything other than that they had to get out, find a new place, and leave nothing behind.
She was glad she had her suitcases ready from her weekend trips to see her grandparents in their Overbrook Park row house. It was from her grandmother that she had learned how to cook Italian food and proper grooming for a young girl, and all of that girly stuff she couldn’t garner from her otherwise terrific dad.
With bags packed and no clear plan, they set out in the heat of the afternoon for an adventure that was 10% perspiration, and 90% inspiration. Dan had to think fast on his feet, a character trait that had served him well while he maintained the 12-acre grounds at the Ivy estate for the past 15 years. He had learned a lot from his father, who was the estate groundskeeper before passing away at a young age, probably from exhaustion.
Dan was the outdoor problem solver at the Ivy estate. If it wasn’t groundhogs, gophers, or ground ivy, it was dealing with the occasional riff-raff and hangers-on that would come to see what all the architecture magazines and local society rags had written up as the most extraordinary estate on the whole Main Line.
While it was a crisis, he was able to keep his calm and write down a list of possible places to crash for a night or two with Isabella and their belongings in tow. He had always taught Isabella that writing down lists was the best way to deal with a troubling dilemma.
There was always his parents, but Dan did not relish the idea of staying overnight in “gossip town,” as he called Overbrook Park. The neighborhood was a working class, tight-knit community. Once the “yentas” and “nonas” found out that eligible Dan was looking for a place to stay, he would be invited for lasagna by every hopeful future mother-in-law. Plus, he didn’t want his parents to worry. They didn’t need the aggravation, and he didn’t need the hassle.
Dan’s brainstorming soon yielded fruit. He remembered the name of a friend from his church who was the superintendent of a building in Ardmore, Ned Blake. Ned had mentioned that sometimes there were available rooms at the building. With a few phone calls, and all of his and Isabella’s worldly belongings in the trunk of his pick-up, they moved into one of these vacancies, a two-bedroom apartment in a building next to the Ardmore train station.
Soon, he was entrenched in town life. Dan enjoyed being able to walk to the farmer’s market, and he could take the train anywhere, never needing to pollute the earth with his truck unless he needed it for work-related projects. Plus, Isabella could even walk to school. This made it the ideal next step.
For Isabella, however, the new apartment was a far cry from the open land and greenery to which she had always been accustomed. Secondly, the train schedule would be permanently engraved upon her subconscious mind. It was almost like a party trick how Dan and Isabella would be able to rattle off the schedule to the city and back, and sometime his mom would call him instead of checking the Amtrak schedule. Pretty soon, however, she got used to the sounds of the train, and they no longer kept her up at night. The disappointment of suddenly being ordered off the Ivy estate, however, did.
The rent was going to be due very soon, so Dan asked his friend if the landlord would consider swapping landscaping on his rental properties in exchange for rent and utilities. The deal was struck, and with the good recommendation from his friend, he was able to also get some additional landscaping jobs here and there in the area.
At first, he was using the garden tools that were in the basement storage at the apartments, but it was soon clear that he would need his own tools, trucks, and even helpers. And with that, Albero Landscaping took off. Truthfully, when word got out that the second-generation gardener from the Ivy estate was out on his own, there were many who clamored for his attention to their properties. And word traveled fast about Dan’s yen for turning a mediocre yard into an Eden-like oasis.
Chapter 7 - Time to Vent
“Men are mortal, diamonds last forever.”
Julia to her daughter, Charlene, upon seeing her new engagement ring
After the stressful lunch meeting with Max, Isabella wanted to vent. How dare he be so darned handsome and so wrong about the environment at the same time?
While Isabella’s best friend, Jade, would be at work at this time of day, this just couldn’t wait.
Isabella took a windy back road to get out to the film studio, fuming about Max the whole way.
The receptionist at the Conshohocken movie studio where her friend worked as an assistant producer and video editor looked up and smiled. “I tried the peat moss alternative you told me about, Isabella, and it worked great. I’m so glad you told me about the peat bogs taking thousands of years to regenerate, that’s unbelievable.”
“Great, Nancy. It’s nice to see you. Is Jade around?” Isabella asked, trying not to sound too desperate to see her friend.
“Sure, I’ll let her know you’re here. She is always working so hard and could probably use a little coffee break. You’re good for her. If she had it her way, she’d be here 24/7 making mo
vie magic and skipping meals.”
Drinking coffee in the break room and resisting the tempting donuts, Jade asked what this impromptu visit was about.
“You’re working with Max Ivy, of the Wynnewood Ivy’s?” Jade mockingly drew out every syllable in a mock-old-money tone. “That’s great, right?”
Realizing that Isabella was bent out of shape at the idea of working with her former nemesis, Jade quickly saw what her BFF needed from her, and switched to scorned woman tone.
“I can’t believe he doesn’t remember us. I mean, we were the ones on the stage crew who had the idea to use real motorcycles down the aisles, which was so dramatic! Remember how exciting it was when those Harleys revved up? Wow! Max Ivy is home to visit. Do you think he might remember me? I was more noticeable with being the only person of color on that production. Gosh, it has been forever since that fun cast party at the end of the show.” It was hard for Jade to hide her enthusiasm about the local man turned national celebrity, renowned for his good looks. “He sure was a smooth Danny, though, I’ll give you that much.”
Prune, Plant, or Plunder? Page 3