He had farmed sixty years before his wife passed and he moved into town. He was out in his own yard a lot that fall, in a cardigan too thin for the mornings, raking leaves he did not need to rake.
His wife Ida had died in the spring. Their kids were in Wichita and Denver and did not come much.
I would wave, and he would lift his rake, and that was most days the whole of his conversation with another living soul. I knew that because I had started watching for him, the way you do once you notice a person is alone.
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“You will beat the frost if you cover them,” he said. “Old sheets. Bedsheets over the frame on the bad nights. Ida and I did it for the tomatoes forty years.”
So I did that too. I put every old sheet I owned over the cold frame on the hard nights.
I lay in bed listening to the wind and getting up at two to check. Dale got up with me every time, without once complaining.
By the second week of October those reserve plants were cracking color. Gold and rust and that deep red. A hundred and four pots. I counted them twice.
They were not as big as the first crop had been. A mum you bring on in a hurry is a smaller mum, and these had been pushed.
But they were full and tight and healthy, and the color came in true. On a porch at dawn, nobody would ever know they were the second string.
The street sale had come and gone by then, the first Saturday. It had been thin, because the best mums in the neighborhood had been sold on a church corner two weeks early.
The pantry had made maybe four hundred dollars. I had not said a word to anyone about why.
I waited for a still night with no frost warning. Then I did not sleep at all, because I was going to do it before anybody woke up.