The Mums I Set on Every Porch

A Hundred Pots

I need to tell you how much those hundred pots were. Then you will understand what was walking off that corner.

Our street does a fundraiser every fall. It has for as long as I have lived on Sycamore, which is going on twenty-six years.

Every porch on the block puts out mums the first Saturday of October. People drive in from all over the county to buy them. The money goes to the town food pantry, so there is a heating fund for the families that run short in January.

Loaves and Fishes, the pantry is called. It feeds about ninety households a month in a town of two thousand.

A good many of them are old. Widows on a fixed check, a couple of young mothers, a farm family or two that had a bad year.

They are the kind of people who will not ask for help twice. So you have to catch them before the cold does, or you miss them.

For the first years we all just bought mums from the garden center and marked them up a dollar. Then I retired from the school cafeteria.

I had time, and I had a cold frame my husband Dale built me against the south wall of the garage. So I started growing them myself.

A gallon pot of garden mums runs eight to twelve dollars at the sale. If I grew them, the whole price was profit for the pantry, not just the markup.

This year I grew a hundred. I grew them from rooted cuttings I set in April.

I pinched them back twice through the summer so they would mound instead of stretch. The last pinch was right around the Fourth of July, the way my mother always said. By September they were tight balls of bud, gold and rust and a deep red I was proud of.

A hundred pots at ten dollars each is a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars is a lot of heating oil for a lot of cold kitchens.

That was the whole point of them. I did not grow them for a trip. I grew them for January.

Pril knew every bit of that. She had stood in my yard in August and said they were the best crop I had ever brought on.

She had helped me carry flats. She knew where every one of those pots was going, and she knew why.

That was the part I kept coming back to, standing on that corner. Not that someone took them. That Pril took them, and Pril knew.