These sisters sold flowers from a red wagon when Tudor Road was dirt. They’re ready for something else.

A heavy August rain rumbled on the corrugated greenhouse roof and dripped in among the plants. Anna Sutton pulled out a cigarette and, unable to find a lighter, stepped around the cash register and reached into her sister Patty's pocket.

"The last two years we've lived and worked together," she said. "Her husband died in March. She's had a real sh—y year."

Sutton's Brown Thumb Greenhouse is for sale, as it has been for a couple of years. Anna and Patty almost hoped no one would make an offer when they first put the business and their attached home on the market. Five generations of their family had planted too many memories here.

Their parents and grandparents are gone. Anna and Patty do all the work themselves now, ordering, planting, growing and selling. Their many children and grandchildren all know how to raise plants and answer gardeners' questions, but only fill in at the greenhouse.

"They all have better-paying careers," Anna said. "You don't get rich in this business. If you take all the hours we work and added it up, we probably make $5 an hour. But we always enjoyed it. Until things got hard."

Now she said she doesn't care if the greenhouse gets bulldozed.

The sisters started selling together as little girls when their mother, Arda Sutton, grew too many tomatoes and cucumbers on the family's old place on Turpin Street. They would load a red wagon with produce and pull it through neighborhood streets.

Arda began taking orders for plants from neighbors and from a long-gone feed and seed store on Tudor Road.

"Us kids would go trooping across Tudor Road carrying them," Anna said. "Of course, Tudor was a little dirt road in those days. A bunch of little kids could go across with red wagons. Nowadays, you'd get hit three times."

"We'd wait an hour for a car to go by," Patty said. "We'd wait all day for a truck. We wanted to hear their horn."

The Air Force brought the Suttons to Anchorage first in 1954. Dick and Arda settled down here in 1956 and his parents followed. Dick worked as an air traffic controller, fixed TVs, drove a Bobcat loader and sold gravel, among other jobs. When computers came out, he took them apart.

He loved flying. Back in the days when the Fur Rendezvous sled dog races were Anchorage's Super Bowl, he flew a cameraman in a helicopter to follow the teams.

"We always had an airplane growing up," Anna said. "That's why neither of us eats fish anymore. We grew up on it. Fish, moose and caribou. We love to fish, but we don't eat it."

Patty recalled how her dad once flew into a power line. The sisters began debating that memory. They finish each other's sentences, but often with amendments.

"That was back in the day when they drank and flew," Anna said. "I think that's why they went nose down in the Knik River. Because Uncle Jay had to pee."

"No, he was alone," Patty said.

The family put together the greenhouse on Tudor out of many pieces, including a Quonset hut bought off one of the military bases around 1962. You can still see the hinges in its rafters. Anna said the building gets shorter every year as the arched supports rot into the ground.

As girls, the sisters raced to see who could plant flats of flowers faster. They earned 35 cents apiece. When they got too fast, their mother cut the rate.

Anna said the main building went up in 1969. Patty disagreed.

"It was built when I was pregnant with Sarah," she said, then turned to me and said, "We have a lot of these little arguments."

In the 1980s, they would enter their plants in contests at the state fair to pay for admission for their young children. Hundreds of ribbons are in a box somewhere.

The last greenhouse went up around 1980. Volcanic ash stained it brown in 1991.

Their grandmother went blind and leased the business to the sisters and, when she died, left it to them.

When big-box stores came to town and began selling marigolds and petunias, they switched to more exotic plants, topiary, moss, water plants and air plants. They worked harder and stayed open later in the year.

After the weather cools, they wait at the kitchen table for infrequent customers to buzz.

The sale of the property is supposed to pay for retirement. They planned to sell the business and move to Seward to fish more.

Then Patty was diagnosed with breast cancer last year.

Anna accompanied her to all 20 rounds of chemotherapy and 33 rounds of radiation. They opened the greenhouse late on chemo days.

Patty came back to work on the third day after her mastectomy.

"She's a tough cookie," Anna said.

But Patty wasn't up to tending the plants and driving the Bobcat. Anna switched jobs with her. She is the more talkative sister and used to work mostly with customers.

"I think she's gotten a lot tougher than she was," Patty said.

Anna looked at her cigarette and thought of her grandfather, who died of lung cancer a year after getting his gold Cadillac DeVille, which he watched being built in the factory in 1969. The sisters still own the car.

They still do a lot of things from long ago. They still grow a custom flower basket for a woman named Vera who died in the 1970s. Vera's family comes in to buy it every year.

But as the rain drummed down, streamed over plastic sheeting and dripped through holes, Anna said she just wants to sell and leave. A real estate agent told her the commercial parcel on Tudor would be worth $1 million as a flat lot.

"Last year was a hard year," she said.

But Patty shook her head.

"We've had a lot of fun in here, and we've made a living," she said. "You can't say we haven't made a good living."

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