After 30 Years as a Firefighter, I Bought a Lavender Farm in Oregon. The Woman Who Answered My Ad Wasn’t Looking for a Job

She was 55, with shoulder-length black hair going silver and the posture of someone used to running meetings. She showed up for the interview in jeans that still had the store creases in them.

I asked about her experience.

“I was the chief financial officer of a hospital system in Seattle for eleven years,” she said.

I put down my coffee.

“And you want to cut lavender for fifteen dollars an hour?”

“Yes,” she said. “I want to work with my hands. I want to be outside. I want to go home tired for a good reason.”

I hired her on the spot. I figured she’d last a week.

She lasted the whole summer.

She was terrible at first. She cut the stems too short and tied the bundles too loose. But she never complained, and she never quit early, and by July she was faster than me.

She also noticed things.

“Your prices are too low,” she told me one afternoon. “You’re losing money on every essential oil bottle you sell. And you’re not claiming half the tax deductions you’re entitled to.”

“I’m a firefighter,” I said. “Not an accountant.”

“Then let me help.”

Two evenings a week, after the farm closed, she sat at my kitchen table with my books. She restructured my pricing. She found a better deal on my insurance policy. She wrote a business plan for weddings and private events in the barn.

I still didn’t know why a hospital executive wanted to cut lavender for a living.

She told me in August.

The year before, she’d had a heart attack. In her office, at 9:40 at night, alone, during budget season. A cleaning woman found her and called 911.

“I lay in that hospital bed,” she said, “in a hospital I helped run, and I realized I had no idea what my life was for. I had money. I had a title. I didn’t have anything I actually loved.”

“So you answered an ad for a lavender farm.”

“So I answered an ad for a lavender farm,” she said, and laughed.

Then, in late August, came the fire.

It was a hot, dry afternoon with an east wind. Somebody on the county road threw a cigarette out a truck window. The grass along my fence line went up in seconds.

I didn’t think. Thirty years of training took over.