The Stand I Set at My Own Lane

The twine bit into my fingers the way it had for forty autumns, and I welcomed it.

I had three corn shocks tied and standing by seven that first Saturday, their tops fanned out like the skirts of women at a dance. The frost was still silver on the ditch grass. My breath hung in front of me. I set a card table at the foot of my own lane, the one my husband Virgil poured the gravel for in 1981, and I weighted a cardboard sign down with a river rock.

Eunice, the sign said, in my own hand. Shocks, gourds, mums.

I had two shocks standing and one more half tied across my knees. My coffee thermos steamed on the corner of the card table. A chickadee worked the dead sunflower heads by the mailbox and paid me no mind at all.

The gravel under my boots was Virgil’s gravel. He hauled it himself the fall I was carrying our daughter, spread it with a landscape rake, cussed it level. A man’s whole life can be read in the ground he leaves behind him if you know how to look.

A quarter mile up the county road, bright as a carnival, sat the stand my son Gary had built. He had a banner on it now. He had a card reader that took the tap of a phone. He had my shocks, the ones I tied the week before he told me to go sit down, lined up along his rail with a price on them that was double what I ever charged.

I was sixty-eight years old. According to Gary that was the whole trouble.

So I poured my coffee from the thermos, and I waited for the first car to slow.