My Low Wage Life

Once a week my uncle’s landscaping company would clean up my yard and the surrounding area. Every Wednesday, when I would pull out of my driveway at seven am on route to school, I would be greeted by enormous smiles from the gardeners working on my lawn. They always seemed like happy people. On the occasions that they worked on the weekend I would say hello to them as I walked into my house and they would smile and try to battle the communication barrier in order to respond to my hello. They always seemed like nice people.

I bring this up because these gardeners and landscaping workers, who are mostly Hispanic and speak little English, remind me of a time when I was a little bit younger. My family and I were moving houses because we had outgrown our old one and had a great deal of furniture and other materials that were unneeded. We had two different sets of furniture in the house. We had the furniture that we used and was on display in the house and we had some old ratty stuff out in the garage.

We decided that the times had changed and we needed some new furniture to compliment our new house, so the furniture we now used in our old house would become our garage/backup furniture in the new one. This meant that we had to get rid of the old furniture that had been sitting in our garage for who knows how long. My mom decided to give the furniture to one of the gardeners who worked on our yard.

The next day that gardener talked to my mom for about fifteen minutes explaining his gratefulness. He was on the verge of tears as he showed my mom pictures of his children and how happy they were now that they had furniture. This man was overwhelmed with joy because his children now had the luxury of the furniture my family no longer wanted. And his joy was so great that he felt compelled to approach my mom and let her know. I was blown away by this because not only did I not even know we had this furniture in our garage; I didn’t know any would want it. Also, it made me realize that our gardener was a human just like me, and had a family just like me. Previously he had been just a laborer who lived in a snapshot in time in which I would wave to him on my way to school.

This interaction got me thinking about the people I don’t see: the beneficiaries of the hand-me-down couch. What were their lives like? Better yet what were they like? Where did they live? Where did they go to school? How were they treated? And were they destined to follow in their father’s footsteps? All these questions swirled and I had no idea about any of them. I was connected to these people not only because they were now the proud owners of my old couch, but I interacted with them everyday without having any idea of it.