Sally’s Boutique

A long, long, long time ago when I first started working in the floral business, I was still in highschool and the job I snagged was the go to girl at Sun City Florist. For those who are unfamiliar, Sun City is a restricted retirement community so no one under senior age may own or rent there. Young people come in to work the shops but for the most part its just seniors. Its legal to drive a golf cart on the road as well as a 3 wheel bike. The speed limit was never over 30 mph.

I met a delightful woman there, by the name of Jeanie. Jeanie was always dressed to the nines. The jewelry, the hair, the shoes, she rocked the place and she looked like a million bucks. I showed up in jeans, tee, shirt and rubber boots with a flannel shirt over my arm because go to girls didn’t wait on customers, like Jeanie got to, they unpacked the flowers from wholesalers, re-cut the stems, packed the flower coolers, changed the water in the flowers, watered the plants, washed the windows, and swept away the stems from around the designers feet and fetched whatever the designers needed. If they weren’t soaking, cutting floral foam and packing arrangement containers with it for designers to use, they were making bows, tons and tons of bows.

So there was Jeanie looking like she just came from church and I looked like I just fell of a farm truck and rolled in the back door.  When Jeanie was busy with customers out front and the order phone would ring my chapped hands bled all over the telephone so Jeanie would dial out later with a tissue over her finger. But she always smiled and laugh with me. She threw me hugs and kisses because I was too dirty to touch so I never went without her love.

For her I would save an Orchid in the cooler on her very special shelf next to her sack lunch and I kept it alive for months while she nipped into the cooler each Saturday night to take it home to wear on Sunday and bring it back Monday morning for me to mist and soak its stem and tuck away for next week.

I made my first corsage for Jeanie, it was green rose buds and freesia.

I tucked tiny glass water vials onto the rose stems so she could wear it an entire weekend. She was having a reunion of all her children and grandchildren and she was going to stand in the sun for hours.  She wore it a week until the petals fell off and I was so proud my hard teenage nearly heart burst.

Yet Jeanie had a secret, it took her years to tell me. By then I was a design assistant which meant I did all the go to girl stuff, ordered the flowers, took orders out front dressed like an urchin ( by then everyone knew me so being a mess didn’t matter) and designed in a pinch.  For years when Jeanie bounced into work, she never walked, it was sash-shay or bounce. I would always tell her how beautiful she looked.

“ Where’d you get that dress, Jeanie, you look like an angel?” 

“Oh, Sally’s Boutique.”

“Jeanie I love you in purple, that dress makes you look like you own the place!” 

“ Sally’s always make me proud”

And so it went on, throughout our work days together every dress, every pair of shoes, even the jewelry …all from Sally’s.

Finally I needed a dress for something special I forget now what, so I asked Jeanie, “Where IS this Sally’s Boutique?”

She pulled me aside and whispered, “Sally’s is the Salvation Army.”

Turns out my impeccable Jeanie raised more than a handful of kids in a tiny over the road trailer behind a feed store with only a cottonwood tree as air conditioning for many years. She did construction, handled asbestos, took in washing and often starved so her kids would have enough. She once served them rice with weevils, gently reminding them that was not weevils it was protein.  By the time she whispered in my ear she was 69 years old, buried 4 lousy husbands and 1 amazing one she loved to the day she died and dating a man 13 years her junior. Her grandchildren were in the double digits and she was living it up on $6 an hour in the high desert hideaway, she called “the ranch”  feeding wild birds and the occasional javalina family on her days off.  When I move to Tempe to go to college she was still shopping at Sally’s.

It just goes to show we can’t always trust our first impressions. Jeanie was much much more than a bouncy, well dressed beauty  — She was hard won victory in high heels and matching bag.