It is also physically demanding: the handling of large quantities of fresh flowers, the cold temperatures of the walk-in coolers needed to preserve them, the standing and moving that the work requires.

Mary Kenner was doing this work for decades while simultaneously thinking through inventions, drafting patent applications, and navigating the patent system.

The flower shop was not separate from her inventive identity.

It was the context within which her inventive identity was lived.

She was a person who ran a flower shop and also invented things — both things were real, both things required her attention and energy, and the flower shop was the more economically essential of the two for most of her life.

This is the normal condition of most inventors throughout history.