The Stand On The Corner
I knew the mums before I knew what was happening to them.
You grow a thing with your own hands for a whole summer and you know it. You know it the way you know your own children from the back in a crowd.
The gold ones were mine. I had pinched those plants in June and again before the Fourth of July. I would have known that particular bronze gold at fifty feet.
They were sitting in two long rows on folding tables at the corner of Elm and Third, next to the Methodist church. There was a hand-lettered sign above them that said Youth Mission Trip, Help Send Our Kids.
A card table held a cash box and a roll of paper lunch sacks for the small plants. A woman in a quilted vest was making change for a man in a feed cap. The woman was Pril.
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Pril and I had been best friends for thirty-one years. We buried both our mothers the same winter.
She was the one who taught me to can tomatoes without splitting the skins. I was the one who sat up with her the night her Gerald had his first heart attack. There was not much about my life that did not have Pril in it somewhere.
I stood on the sidewalk with my pocketbook on my arm and I could not make the picture come together.
Those were the mums I had grown for the street. Those were the hundred pots I had loaded into Pril’s van myself, three days before, because she had offered to help me haul them to the neighborhood sale.
“Donna,” Pril said, when she looked up and saw me. She did not look caught. She looked pleased. “Can you believe how they are going. I have sold near sixty already and it is not even noon.”
I walked up to the table like a woman in a dream. I touched the rim of one pot.
There was the little chip I knew, a half moon out of the clay, from a pot that had tipped off my potting bench back in August. It was one of mine. Every one of them was one of mine.
“Pril,” I said. “These are for the pantry sale.”
She kept making change. “Well, they are for a good cause either way,” she said. “Kids need to go serve the Lord in Kentucky.”
“Twelve dollars,” she told the man in the cap. He handed it over. He carried off a gold mum I had watered every morning since May.