The Genesis of Anne-Study "Chptr 2"

It was unfortunate for Anne that things had come to this. She had never wanted to be the Conservatory’s Curator. She despised the position in fact. She had avoided the place entirely for years, wanted it gone even. But now, this Monday am, donned in apron and glove hauling the wheeled watering cart she doled out fertilizer to the Livistona chinensis in the great Palm room. Her late father had been the Previous Curator. The great Joh Hibbert. He was a well-known botanist and collector who had spent his life traveling, collecting rare specimens to cultivate and display, ironically in pursuit of conservation. The hypocrisies of conservationism were Anne’s primary repulsion of Conservatory culture. Botanists the world over harvested the rarities of nature and displayed them for the public in the name of conservation. But it was the displays that created the lust for the market in the first place. Foolery! It was a shameless public black market. Led by egotistical scholars like her father who sought their names in history books and ecology magazines hoping to be remembered like Darwin, Roosevelt, and Muir Anne’s second repulsion was that the Conservatory attracted wealthy patrons who had adopted exclusive rights to it. That’s not to say that it wasn’t open to the public, but funding members had decided on hours of operation which did not include convenient times for the working class. Weekends and evenings were reserved for events and scheduled parties. Docent led tours could be scheduled for a fee, which none could afford. Anne had grown up in the Conservatory and knew everyone of its glass panes and curved spires. The light shown through the stained glass around the entryway and colored the mornings depending on the time of year. She knew its hiding places and loose bricks where she stowed away sweets for safe keeping. One summer was spent reading The Secret Garden behind the rock waterfall. The majesties of the story were all around her. She pondered how a fern could unfurl from its dormancy slow enough to be undetected and yet all at once as if to have appeared suddenly. How could a carnivorous plant know how to flex and reflex itself without having a mind for sensation? Could a plant actually feel? Once her father brought a boat small enough to go in the pond of the main room so she could practice writing poetry by candlelight, on evenings when he had to work late. It wasn’t the Conservatory she hated but rather what it fostered, pretension, division, scandal and sometimes shame. All good things in life were like that. Since Eden really. Like the garden itself, God’s gift to man; beautiful and perfect yet stained by the perversions of secrets and personal gain. It could be said that she missed the Conservatory for what it used to mean to her. But she could never go back. Not after what she had seen. For what her father had done that summer night when he thought she had gone home. The night that everything changed, and she learned about the lies people tell and the secrets that they keep in places sworn to be sacred. That fathers play a certain kind of make believe to their wives, and another kind of make believe to the women that they love. She had gone away and sworn she would never come back but it could not be avoided. And though she was made to be there, this time, she promised to be on her guard; not to fall for anything fleeting and wild. Never to lose herself to poetry and romance; and certainly, never to trust anything so tremulous and tender as love again.