DANCING IN DAHLIAS -- How an extraordianry young woman in Rockport, MA redefined her autism by farming a HALF ACRE of delightful FLOWERS!

These dazzling DAHLIAS bring endless joy to countless people lucky enough to know where Jessie Rose's flowers are hiding! PLEASE join me to volunteer to "HELP Jessie ROSE plant DAHLIAS in Spring '25!"

OK, what can DAHLIAS possibly have to do with this never-ending nail biter of an election?

LOTS of us are holding our collective breath as we count down the next 39 plus days until the fate of our Democracy is decided.

But with all this stress turning us red, white and mostly BLUE with anxiety, it’s good, no, it’s absolutely ESSENTIAL, that we step away, now and then — to take a long, slow breath. Maybe we stare at the sunrise or the sunset or step outside to gaze at a star-crisp night sky. Or maybe we sit in a tiny city park or in the backyard garden for a moment or two or four. Or perhaps we just go for a stroll — even if it’s just a silly little walk around the block, or down an old dirt road.

That’s exactly what I did — quite unexpectedly — a few weeks ago when my husband and I headed to one of the prettiest — and most MAGICAL — places in these here United States, to celebrate our 46th wedding anniversary.

Rockport, Massachusetts is 40 miles around the bend heading northeast out of Boston, a sweet little community steeped in shipbuilding and seafaring history. Long occupied by Indigenous tribes and officially settled by Europeans in the late 1600s, Rockport sits on the tip of Cape Ann — sticking way out in the magnificently blue Atlantic Ocean. Rockport offers a lovely array of gorgeous beaches, including Old Garden Beach, where I stood in the ocean talking to a fully suited father/daughter scuba team who were casually paddling out to sea for the afternoon to catch clams that they would stuff for dinner!

It doesn’t get much better than this. While Cape Ann doesn’t seem to enjoy quite the same cachet as say, Provincetown, on Cape Cod (shhhh, folks in Rockport, say, we like it that way!) it’s one of the most amazing towns I’ve ever visited ANYWHERE, east or west coast, in all my 71 years.

In three days over Labor Day Weekend, I met a half dozen or more of the nicest and most fascinating folks, genuinely friendly people, all of whom seemed to appear out of nowhere to offer suggestions or help. One smiling woman emerged to help carry our floppy, seriously broken, beach tent. Another woman simply reached over and grabbed my elbow when the waves thick with seaweed swelled up so fast I lost my balance.

A couple people stopped me at different moments but in the same exact place on the sidewalk and began talking to me as if we were old friends as we stood marveling

together at how towering black-eyed Susans sparkled in the stunning morning light.

One woman — Barbara, a nurse for 47 years — spent a good long time breaking my heart telling me how she was fighting a valiant fight against multiple myeloma, how her husband had died of dementia during COVID — she had to talk to him from outside the bedroom window. And then, the kicker: how she’d lost her thirty-something year old son to a brain tumor in April; Barbara had sprinkled his ashes out at sea just a few days before.

Without missing a beat, she moved me a few feet down the sidewalk and pointed — explaining how a severely damaged mimosa — a marvelously delicate pink flower —

yes, a mimosa, the tropical sort — had managed to survive a brutal New England winter against all odds. She loved the tree, of course, because it was a fighter, just like her. As she walked away, smiling, Barbara said, “Onward! I’m like a Timex watch, ‘I take a licking but I keep on ticking!’”

All these folks simply wanted to chat, with absolutely no agenda, political or otherwise. Instead, they served up smiles and stories and thick slices of wide open friendliness, no strings attached, an American-style people pie we are known for the world over.

But the person who will FOREVER top the list of memorable people living in Rockport is a woman who quite literally popped up from beneath a table in the middle of a farm field, scaring the bejesus out of me! That woman is Jessie Rose. Within moments after she came out from underneath the table and introduced herself accompanied by a delightful smile, I knew all I needed to know: faced with the all too real limits imposed by autism, Jessie ten years ago had a divinely-inspired brainstorm: she would make her living growing DAHLIAS,

those dazzling, plate-sized rainbow-assorted people pleasers. Flowers that come from funny brown TUBERS.

Farming, it turns out, suits Jessie Rose to a T. There’s only one thing wrong with this picture: DAHLIA — not ROSE — should definitely be Jessie’s last name!

What makes her story so exceptional — and our encounter on Sunday morning, September 1, 2024, so special — is that Jessie, like Barbara, is one hell of a fighter. Her most recent challenge is physical: the reason she was lying back beneath the table resting on a folding chair, which is why I couldn’t see her — is that she had back surgery three months ago, in June, 2024. Her back gave out because she spends endlessly long hours hunched over as she farms a half acre of DAHLIAS a stone’s throw from the ocean.

Talking to Jessie, you wouldn’t know she is autistic. Her spoken — and written — words are precise and clear, almost poetic. Smiles and gentle humor seem to come so easily. But don’t be fooled. Jessie — like so many millions of women and men and children who live with disabilities — faces challenges the likes of which we can’t imagine because we aren’t walking around in their skin.

Within five minutes of our encounter, Jessie calmly explained to me that she cannot hold down a “typical” job. Even though she is bright off the charts, she started college but just couldn’t push through. She explained to me that she can hold conversations for only so long before the words stop having a clear meaning. The way she described it, I can feel it as a kind of system overload, with too much electricity buzzing and surging and eventually blowing out the circuit.

That’s why, when Jessie tried working in a coffee shop, the clamor of dishes and cups and plates and pots and the endless echo chamber of ordinary conversation set her mind going like a whirligig. She had to quit after only three months.

Ah, but did she give in and give up? No, that’s the moment Jessie’s brilliance really shone: she decided that what the world needs most right now is, JOY, yes, through her favorite FLOWERS! And so singlehandedly, she began planting DAHLIA TUBERS in a beautiful piece of land in Rockport (the town where she landed after college in Boston didn’t work out.)

Eight years went by, with the kinds of challenges you might expect — drought, wind— and then, whammo! FLOOD. Two years ago, DISASTER struck! Jessie’s field was flooded. Squinting into the sunlight, looking like she just might start crying, she said breathlessly, as if she’s still trying to process the mammoth loss, “Eight years of DAHLIAS, I lost all of it!”

I found myself holding MY breath.

A moment of quiet. “So…so what happened?” I asked, waiting. Wondering. That breathtaking smile came flooding back to Jessie’s face.

“The people of Rockport came to my rescue,” she said quietly, shrugging, great appreciation shining all over her happy face. “They started a GoFund Me Campaign, and they built that barn and helped me move to this new field!”

Goosebumps swelled up my arms as she gestured to the sunshine-colored barn that I first noticed after a simple hand-painted sign announcing her farm: “Roving Radish, Have Flowers Will Travel” caught my eye on what was supposed to be a short walk along the beach road.

I wanted to run home for my checkbook or take out my over-used credit card, neither of which I was carrying. I wanted to buy ten dozen flowers, or donate to the GoFundMe campaign except, guess what?

“Oh well that’s over with now,” Jessie says. “I mean I have my barn and my field and I sell the flowers every Sunday afternoon.” She charges way too little: $1.50 a stem for the smaller DAHLIAs, and $5 for the show stoppers.

“Jessie, you need to raise your prices,” I announced. She laughed. I phoned my husband. “Rich, please come over here, to this field of DAHLIAs where I am dancing. You won’t believe the amazing person I just met and the field I just found.”

While we waited for him to arrive, Jessie led me into the sunshine-colored barn where crates of Dahlia tubers are neatly stacked neatly on shelves. Reaching for a tuber that had sprouted a tiny green tree, Jessie said “Here, take this one, a Beaucon white, take this for your anniversary!”

I felt my heart skip. I thought to myself, “how the hell did this happen? How did I get so lucky?” I turned to her in the barn and said, “OK, so what do you need next?”

That’s when she said that even though she is recovering nicely from back surgery, she is in dire need of free labor, a few (dozen?) willing hands to join her when DAHLIA season begins all over again next year. That’s when thousands of funny brown wrinkled tubers need to get tucked into the earth!

So if you happen to live in Boston, or Providence, or Hartford, or New York, or New Haven or Bridgeport, Connecticut, or like me, in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, maybe you will find a way to get to Rockport, MA, for a few days, to enjoy the glorious ocean, of course. And then, to lend a hand to Jessie Rose — who will be bending and planting DAHLIAs at the Roving Radish farm, come Spring of ‘25.