Next Time

There is a dorm on campus decorated unlike the rest. It’s located in the gray three-story building with the curvy, shiny blue chimney-like topper on the right side of the flat roof. The décor of that dorm? Thrive Market containers, packaging, and boxes. Elegant, no? The large boxes with the green Thrive emblem are sturdy enough to construct a 12-foot long stretch of interlocking shelves—it completely fills the wall adjacent to the wall with the two windows.

On the shelves are meticulously organized nut butter jars, syrup bottles, and glass dressing containers. All Thrive Market brand. And all holding life. Plant life.

Around the rest of the room, the packaging innards has been twisted and braided into garland and held to the walls with tape. The effect is calming with the sheer plastic and strung packaging peanuts being illuminated by the accompanying blue LED lights.

For Jacy, there really was no other way for her to live at school. She felt so much regret when she threw things out as each item could have had a second use with a bit of creativity. She had always been like this.

She remembered one adventure to Hershey Park two years ago with her high school friends. After 6 hours in a 98°F bath of sunshine, her friends had convinced her that she needed to try the Lemon-Berry Wave BBlz since they were “the best” for hot days. And they were “the best”, Jacy thought at this moment looking to the left most of the shelving where the clear, globe shaped vase with the white words, BBlz, was perched. Her friends had groaned when she insisted that she just had to rinse it out in the park bathroom and use it for her Conehead air plant. It was a nice change up from the fruits and vegetables she had sprouting.

In her spare time from studying city agriculture and civil engineering, Jacy had crafted new furniture in her dorm to accommodate her pullulating garden. For starters, she had put a 2-foot addition on the standard dorm desk and created tiered ceiling shelves using the year supply of cardboard stock she had saved.

A more sustainable and self-reliable lifestyle was an idea she had toyed around with in high school, but now that she had been on her own at college, it was being enacted more effectively without help from her parents who loved to make life easier. Not a bad thing, but it messed with her experimental outcomes. How does one budget if they never have to spend any money due to the parental goody system?

The experiments were her foundation for revolutionizing the agriculture in cities among other things like the common recycling and composting. Often, she would daydream that the city hall of her hometown would make the switch in applying just some of the basics in sustainable living. It could not even recycle metal or glass! One goal Jacy had was to bring her “green” knowledge to her hometown, but first she wanted to gain some credibility at school with social experiments and surveys. Maybe then her hometown would broaden its horizons when they saw results from a neighboring town.

One Tuesday night, coming back from the communal bathroom, Jacy saw one of the residents gawking in front of her door. She knew exactly what was going on. What else does one do in response to seeing strong stalks of broccoli potted in one corner of the room along with four cauliflower variants in the next; dozens of herbs, fruits, and vegetables on cardboard shelves in dressing jars; vine plants climbing up the sides of the shelves; a tray of bean seedlings nearly 5 inches tall on the desk, and five 4-foot sunflowers in a school dorm?

Jacy nonchalantly walked up and asked, “What do you think? It’s a work in progress.”

“Ah! Jacy! What are earth is up with your dorm?! It looks like some college version of The Secret Garden. What exactly do you have growing in there? “

Jacy loved the confrontation. “Well, Penelope, I have every plant that you could find at the farmer’s market in the square, plus seedlings from the produce I have bought there. Couldn’t just eat the goods, I had to germinate ‘em as well. It’s an experiment for practical sustainable living.”

“What do the RAs think of this? I mean, did they say anything about it possibly being a hazard?”

Jacy chuckled and then replied, “Funny you should bring them up. I only just heard from Matt about his encounter with my room during the fall break evaluations. He said that he thought he had gone meshuga upon entering. It was unlike anything he had seen before in his 3 years as an RA. ‘A bit unorthodox for dorm décor, but still abiding by campus rules’ were his words. His main concern was that I might be growing something illegal.”

“Do you eat what you grow in here?” Penelope seemed perplexed by the odd living style of her fellow floor mate. They had spoken a few times before, but Jacy could tell those former interactions had not exposed this side of her life in the least.

“Of course,” she answered. “Eventually, I want for most people in this city and in my hometown to have access to their own garden, maybe a communal one also. I’m hoping it will limit automobile traffic to stores and encourage more sustainable practices such as composting and recycling. It’s also much healthier.”

“You think people could make that kind of switch?” Penelope inquired suddenly soundly more skeptical. “I mean, people are just so busy today—“

“Penelope,” Jacy interluded, “I think it’s more of a problem to continue the trend of wasteful living than to change our routine for half an hour of picking produce at a garden, five minutes of recycling, and practically no time to compost. It’s our job to treat the planet better than what we are doing now. Besides, people always have time, we just have to prioritize it. Here, do you like tomatoes?” Jacy walked into her room and took a cashew butter jar from the shelf. “This plant is going to produce a bunch of them in the next couple weeks. You can have it as a starter.”

“Oh my goodness, don’t you know I don’t have a green thumb. It will be dead in a day! Are you sure you want to give me this?”

“If it means you might learn how to enjoy living more sustainably, absolutely. You might find that you like gardening and that it’s a peaceful pastime from the studying and athletics.” Jacy had noted Penelope’s backpack with the Colonel Tennis emblem on the back pouch. She might only secure the advantage of health associated with a sustainable diet with this one, but it was worth it.

Before retiring to her own dorm, Penelope thanked Jacy and asked that she give her some help with the plant in the next couple days so that she really did not kill it. With that, Jacy had reached her first follower in this movement.

Over the course of the semester, interactions like this happened every few days thanks to Penelope spreading the word about her strange encounter. With all the traffic to her room, Jacy had freed up a bit of space in her garden to try new methods of effective growing that might work better for people who were living in homes with limited natural light. The thirteen story buildings that crammed people in were not the best for this lifestyle with only having one window in the entire flat. Then after that problem, there was the solution for people to water their plants when they had to leave for break or vacation.

She also gave thought to the problem of microenvironment collapses due to pests entering a person’s home. Last month, after a mite infestation had cleared out her eggplant, Jacy had “fixed” the ventilation and air conditioning to prevent pests and other unwanted contaminants from entering. This would be important if people were to sustain themselves on their own grown produce.

For the past month, Jacy had been living on her garden and with all going well she decided to repeal her meal plan as the cafeteria did not follow sustainable practices. That was a whole other project to consider. The rest of her food was of course purchased on Thrive Market. How else was she accumulating the material for her furniture? She only needed a few necessities from Thrive for nutrient sufficiency and for flavoring.

Only a year ago had Jacy started turning to Thrive. It was so much easier than trying to convince someone to take her to the organic grocery store. Everyone else around her would drive 10 minutes to Walmart, but Jacy desired better quality food which came at a cost of an extra 20 minutes one way to the nearest health store. Food services that had the same goal of sustainable living were side experiments to measure the expense of this lifestyle. Plus, she didn’t just like to eat plants.

As the semester passed on, her social experiments showed that students enjoyed having a plant or two to look after, but most students just did not have her ambition for the upkeep of a full-on garden. They wanted to spend the couple extra hours each week having real fun. Like many times in her life, Jacy wondered when humans would learn to warp time so that more hours could be added to the day. Maybe then this lifestyle would be practical? She had already completed all the plans for lighting, watering, and pest issues, which had even been reviewed by the city’s recycling coordinator and a professor in the environmental science department. Minor changes were needed, but otherwise, from her perspective, people just needed to get moving. Make it happen if my ideas are nearly Grade A, she whined inside.

On her last day of sophomore year exams, Jacy’s parents came to pick her up. The number of questions they asked her on the way home, encouraged her that maybe there would be a time and place for her work soon. If she could convince her parents that this was practical, maybe they would be the Penelope for her hometown. She awaited the upcoming months and promised herself that even if the people at school forgot about her until the next semester and even if she could not depend on her parents to pass along her elevator talk on sustainability, she would not change. Jacy’s game would be stronger the next time and the next time. She had to so that there would be a next time in the future.