When I grow up.

As I describe my current lineup of 'jobs I'm applying for THIS week', my mom says to me: OOO! "I want to do that when I grow up!" And I believe her.

My mom, a hard working, well respected and well-rounded nurse practitioner, graduated with her master's when my older sister graduated from high school. This isn't to say she wasn't busy before that, but she was busy with other endeavors, trying out anything and everything she thought might be interesting.

For a while she worked in an electronics lab assembling and testing transducers. She later did some fieldwork with the US Forest Service and fought the girdling of old growth timber for lumber harvest. She quit when she realized this effort was futile. Before my sister and I came along she played guitar and sang in a band and rode dirt bikes.

In the small time slots left over, she worked as a volunteer EMT for the local ambulance service, and taught EMT I and II classes. We would sometimes spend late nights at the firehouse (also home of the ambulances) watching my mom demonstrate how to resuscitate someone. "Are you okay are you okay?" she would shout while shaking her patient, Resusci Anne. She was a life-size plastic dummy with blue cotton clothes, a big barrel chest with lungs and a trap door filled with some big batteries. She smelled a lot like my cabbage patch kids. "Call an ambulance!" Then she would check Anne's pulse. "Start CPR!" We would hear as I crawled under the nearest table and curled up for a nap. "One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three, BREATH!" and my mom would pinch Anne's soft nose and blow into her mouth, her plastic chest would double in size.

Then I was asleep. Only to wake when the radio (which lived on my mom's dresser and was never off) crackled and spouted out the description and location of some form of accident. She would fly out of bed, out of the house and tear out of the driveway in no time flat, even though it was 3:00 in the morning.

It was always an adventure. One day we got a call saying two homeless men had fought on the freight train, and one man had been pushed off. The train carried on, and the man almost froze to death. We went looking for him. We found him and fortunately he was alive, but suffered from sever frostbite. We heaved him into the blazer and drove him to the ambulance. I was probably 10 years old.

I think I decided then that I wanted to take care of animals and plants more than people. I decided I would be a marine biologist instead.

Marine biology was my career of choice for nearly 5 years, for whatever reason. All the while I would graft and start plants in the greenhouse, train them and water them. I would plan and start our giant garden with my dad. At some point it clicked that I actually wanted to be a plant scientist, not a marine biologist (we rarely ever even went to the ocean), I wanted to do research in the jungle! And so my science fair project focused on plant biology. I killed half of my primrose population with varying salt concentrations.

The idea of studying plants stuck for many years. That is, until I graduated and tried to get a job. My direction was derailed for a good 6 years while I ski bummed, worked as a housekeeper, traveled the world, worked for a couple non-profits, managed an apartment complex, built sets for theater productions, and decided to go to grad school for landscape architecture. I suppose I was doing all those other little things that had been on my list of things to do when I grow up, then checking them off the list.

With grad school I was looking for a way to study plants and apply my science background to projects that I would get to design and build. Little did I know, I had gone to the opposite extreme: I was delving into the world of art, with a little science mixed in. It was fairly early on in my time in grad school that I realized I would likely be behind a desk all day if I worked in this field. Either that or covered in poison oak from fieldwork.

After two field seasons of studying historic oak savanna, I decided maybe plant science and landscape architecture weren't my careers of choice. But I was too stubborn to quit, and besides, I was having fun being in school. Who cares about the job afterward? I do now. So I'm back to something closer to what I wanted to do when I was in grade school. Only this time, I want to include all the things I've learned: lab and field research techniques, tromping through the woods, working with people and learning new things all the time.

As I work through my days at the coffee shop and REI, I've busied myself with my grown-up dream: plant scientist extraordinaire. I've been doing fieldwork with a master's student. I've been volunteering with REI to eradicate invasive plants. And I've been dreaming about my dream job in a realistic way: there will be parts I won't like. There will be long hot days in the sun and long boring days behind a computer. There may be poison oak, but as long as there are plants and people and challenging work and time outside, I think I'll be happy. And when I find something interesting to do for work, I hope I'll smile and say: "That's what I want to do that when I grow up". And I'll keep my mom's story in the back of my mind and remind myself that I can be anything that I want to be when I grow up.