The Mums I Set on Every Porch

Every Porch On The Street

I started at four in the morning, in the dark, with a headlamp Dale wears for coon hunting and the garden wagon loaded with pots.

The plan was simple. One mum on every porch on Sycamore, from the Hendricks place at the dead end to the Kolaceks’ by the stop sign. Forty-one houses, both sides.

Nobody would see me. Nobody would know for certain who did it. They would just wake up to a street full of flowers.

The grass was wet and cold through my shoes, and the dew soaked my cuffs to the shin.

I pulled the wagon up each walk as quiet as I could. I carried the pot up the steps in both arms, set it square in the middle of the welcome mat, and went back for the next.

My knees told me about every porch. I am fifty-eight, and I had a hundred and four porches of bending in me that morning, and I felt each one.

Dale ran the far side of the street with the second wagon. We did not talk.

There is a particular closeness in doing a secret kindness with your husband in the dark. I cannot explain it to you except to say I married the right man, and I knew it again at four thirty that morning, my knees aching and my breath showing white.

I set a gold one on the Fergusons’ porch. Their furnace was the whole reason any of us grew mums, though they did not know I knew they ran short.

I set a rust one on the widow Hartley’s rail. I set the deepest red I had, the one I was proudest of, in front of the Kolaceks’ door.

Their little girl had leukemia two years back and beat it. That family had been through enough dark mornings.

I skipped no one. Not the house with the barking dog, not the rental that has a different family in it every spring.

A porch is a porch. Everybody on a cold street deserves one bright thing waiting for them when the door opens.

By a quarter to six I had three pots left, forty porches done, and the sky going gray at the edge. My back was a board. And I came to Mr. Settle’s.

Mr Settle’s Step

I set the biggest gold mum I had left on the top step of Mr. Settle’s porch. Right where he came out with his thin coffee every morning to look at his empty yard.

I did not knock. I did not leave a note. I set it down and pulled my wagon home in the last of the dark.

Then I stood at my kitchen window with a cup of coffee and watched the street come awake.

It came awake slow, and then all at once. A porch light here. A storm door there.

The Hendricks boy, heading to his truck for the early shift, stopped dead on his own steps. Then Mrs. Hartley was out on her stoop in her housecoat with both hands over her mouth.

Then the Kolaceks’ girl, the one who beat the leukemia, out in the yard in her nightgown, turning in a slow circle, looking up and down the whole blooming street.

I had to set my coffee down, because I could not hold it steady anymore.

Up and down Sycamore, a flower on every porch. In the gray light they looked like forty little fires somebody had lit while the street was sleeping.

But it was Mr. Settle I was watching for.

His storm door opened at about ten after seven, the way it did every morning. He had his cup in his hand.