The storm and the stakes
In July a storm came through from Nebraska and laid corn down all over the county. I drove out at six the next morning expecting the worst. Every dahlia in the row was standing, and Mom was out on her pad, holding the rope.
“Your stakes,” she said, when she heard my car door. “Your dad would have said you set a good stake. That’s the best thing he ever said about anybody.”
The first blooms opened the next week. The pompons came first, then the Bishops, then the Café au Laits, pale and blush and the size of a dinner plate.
The Duet came last, the way it always did, at the very end of July.
The six seedlings from the porch flat were at the far end of the bed, by the house.
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Five bloomed plain red. The sixth one had not bloomed yet. Mom asked me every day.
The morning before the fair
The Cass County Fair comes right after, at the fairgrounds in Atlantic.
The open class flower show takes entries on Wednesday morning, and Rosemary Kluever had told Mom she could bring as many entries as she liked.
On Tuesday morning we went out early, while the dew was still on the leaves, before the heat came up off the gravel lane.
Mom knelt down on her foam pad on the lane side of the bed, where the gravel was flat and I was right beside her, in her pale blue blouse, with her short white curls and her glasses on.
She found the biggest Duet in the whole row by feel, and she cupped that dark red bloom with its white tips in both her hands.
She put her face right down to it, almost touching it, close enough that the edges of her eyes, the only part that still worked, could catch a little of the color.
She was smiling. I knelt beside her and tied the last loose stem to its wooden stake with twine.
The white farmhouse sat back at the top of the lane with the sun on it.
Down the row, the bed ran in reds and pinks and oranges, every stalk staked straight as a fence, taller than it had ever been in the forty-five years before.
“Is it a good one?” she asked me.
“Mom,” I said, and I had to stop. “It’s the best one you ever grew.”
We cut forty blooms that morning, one of each of her best, and stood each one in its own quart canning jar of cold well water in the back of Andy’s pickup.
Mom ran her fingers over every bloom before we covered them with a damp sheet.