Growing Through COVID-19

When the pandemic hit in 2020, the film industry came to a screeching halt. I had been working practically nonstop for 6 years managing crews on film sets. I didn’t have very long however, to contemplate my newfound freedom. I fell ill with COVID-19 before the lockdowns even began. After fighting the illness for 1 month I had no doubts about how powerful this disease was. During that time, I would talk every day on the phone with my mother as I was confined in my small city apartment. At first, she was concerned for my health, but as I got better, she started to fill me in on her own woes.

My parents are the owners of a large, single location Garden Center that my great-great grandfather started in 1876. Although I had chosen to pursue a career in film, I was still very attached to the business. I grew up in a farmhouse next door to my grandparents on the same land as the family business. As a child I sometimes overheard my parents fighting, not about marital woes but about grave concerns on how to run their company during a time when the big box stores were threatening small businesses nationwide and the internet was pulling their customers out of the garden. Most kids don’t even know their great-great grandparents names, I knew mine vividly. During family dinners my grandparents would often wonder which one of us grandkids would take over the company, because running this company was our family’s tradition.

Our family business had battled recessions, wars and even the great depression, but COVID-19 presented a difficult challenge. The shutdowns began at the beginning of spring, the time of year when we do most of our sales for the whole year. My parents had dug their way out of debt from one recession and they weren’t sure at their age, that they could go through that again.

So, my mother asked me one day on the phone, with a heavy heart, if I would come out to the garden center to film a short documentary about our company shutting down after 144 years of business. I hired a tiny 2-person film crew and came out immediately, but as the story evolved and my brother stepped up to join the company, the short sad story turned into something much larger and unexpected.