The Mums I Set on Every Porch

The anger had burned off on the drive home. What was left was clearer and quieter than anger, and it had a plan in it.

Pril had taken my mums and sold them for money. Fine. I could not undo that.

But I could grow another hundred. And I could give them away for nothing, to everybody, before she ever brought her first pot back.

I could make the whole street bloom and not charge a soul a dime. Let her sell flowers on a corner. I would set them on every porch on Sycamore for free.

It was not all about shaming Pril. I want to be honest with you there. A piece of it was, that first afternoon, and I had to pray that piece back down more than once.

But mostly it was this. She had turned my gift into money. I wanted to turn it back into a gift, so plainly that nobody on the street could mistake which was which.

Dale came and stood at the end of the bed. “Those are three weeks shy,” he said. He knows mums by now.

“Then I have three weeks of work to do,” I said.

Before The Frost

The next two weeks I was out there before the coffee was done, and again after the supper dishes were dried.

I fed them. Garden mums are hungry things, and I pushed them harder than I ever had, a half-strength feeding twice a week.

I watered at the roots in the morning, so they went into the cold nights dry on the leaf. I stopped all pinching the day after the corner, because it was too late to pinch and I needed every bud they had.

When the weatherman started talking frost, I moved the whole reserve bed into the cold frame at night, pot by pot, and back out into the sun by eight each morning.

Dale rigged a little cart out of our old garden wagon, so I could run twenty pots at a time instead of two.

My hands cracked at the knuckles from the cold water and the potting soil. I kept a jar of Bag Balm by the back door and worked it in every night.

I did not mind the work. There is a kind of praying that happens with your hands in the dirt that never once happened to me on my knees in a pew.

It was a cold September turning into a colder October, and the frost was the enemy. One hard freeze on open buds and I would have nothing but black mush and a lesson.

Mr. Settle, two doors down, told me over the fence that the almanac was calling for a killing frost by the eighteenth. Mr. Settle knew weather.