SHOPPING IN THE local supermarket in Lusk, I was surprised to see a selection of orchids for sale. Perhaps I shouldn't have been. There was, after all, produce from all over the world. From sauerkraut to smoked kurpianka, there is an international inventory in our shops - part of the new Ireland, writes Paul Perry.
As for the orchids, I haven't seen one since my time working on an orchid farm in Florida more than 10 years ago. In a gesture of nostalgia, I bought one.
It's a white orchid, with a tint of orange in its petal, a bland trigger to the colourful melange of what I witnessed in North Kendall, but a reminder nonetheless.
How did I come to work on an orchid farm? After having finished my studies and completed an unsuccessful stint as a middle distance athlete at Brown University, I stayed in America and did not come straight back to Ireland. Instead, I ventured into the visa-less morass of the American workaday world.
I suppose I could have found myself a job in one of the many Irish bars dotted around Florida. But a friend had a contact, a phone number and the possible start date was immediate. So I travelled through Royal Palm, Flamingo, Shark Valley and Everglade City, a subtropical preserve of sawgrass prairies and cypress swamp that seemed unreal, made real only by their retelling: a place of pineland hardwood hammocks leading to where the orchid farm lay.
The orchid keeper was an English literature professor who had chucked in his job to work in his own garden. Far from being a man with just green fingers, he also had a laboratory where he carried out tests on the flowers, and engineered, cross-bred and genetically altered the orchids for sale. On other days, he stayed in the house in what he would later in the week call a "blue funk".
It was all fascinating, but it was not why I was there. I was there for manual, menial labour. I was there for the money. I worked with a Mexican man named Victor. We were paid the minimum wage. Both of us were illegal, though I believe the term bandied about now is "undocumented".
Victor and I wielded chainsaws and pruned the trees in the orchard. Imagine tree limbs scattered about the grass. It was where I first tasted star apples, a tropical fruit whose pulp is soft and sweet. We also worked nailing sheets of plastic onto wooden frames in order to cover and protect the orchids from the elements. This was called "wintering". I remember one day we buried a dead owl together. Its death had nothing to do with our pruning of the trees.
I enjoyed the work. The physical exertion of it. The coming home exhausted, but satisfied, after a hard day's work done well. The sun had beaten onto my back. My hands were blistered and my arms ached with the hammering I had done all day. Still, I was satisfied, if tired.
The orchid keeper, when he was not in the laboratory, or assigning tasks and giving orders, was selling his creations to the affluent public. He was a business man with a mind for Yeats, or rather, a man of literature with business on his mind. Victor and I would marvel at the price people were prepared to pay for his orchids.
Nowadays, living in suburban Dublin, Florida seems very far away indeed. There's no more work on the orchid farm for me now, no more trips to the casino on the Native American reservation, or outings to the tropical wilderness of the Everglades, where you could see egrets, wood storks and roseate spoonbills, as well as the American crocodile, Florida panther and West Indian manatee.
Instead, my wife and I have wintered here in a different sense. A year after the arrival of our daughter, we've had to batten down the hatches and prepare ourselves for whatever the winter had to offer; which meant mostly the sleepless nights of first-time parents.
I bought that orchid in the supermarket as a reminder, an acknowledgement, if you like, of that time in Florida on the orchid farm. It's on my desk. If I take care of it, I thought, it might make me something of an orchid keeper.
At one time, in all its glory, it reminded me of all the hard work that goes into making something beautiful, making anything beautiful. But now, not so much, or at least not since our daughter Bláithín, our little flower, has arrived. She's the girl who senses spring is on its way and threatens, in her own playful way, to tear the orchid to pieces.
Paul Perry's second collection of poetry The Orchid Keeper is published by the Dedalus Press