The Tulips Along Pine Ridge Road

That was the whole thing, really. That was what he gave me. I did not need a plan from anyone. I needed somebody to remind me that my mother had known every single person in that county for forty years, and that a woman like that does not leave behind only a quarter mile of flowers.

I did not call a lawyer. I did not call the town. I did not write Colleen a letter.

I wrote a note on a sheet of lined notebook paper in my mother’s kind of handwriting, round and clear, and on Monday I took it to the Farmers Co-op in Viroqua and pinned it to the corkboard next to a notice about round bales and a man looking for a free piano.

It said: Bulb planting. First cold Saturday of November, noon. Pine Ridge Road at the mailbox. Dot’s strip needs replanting. Bring a trowel and a neighbor. We will bring coffee. If you have bulbs to spare, bring them.

Orrin Whitcomb, who runs the feed store, read the note on his way past with a bag of layer pellets on his shoulder. He did not say a word. He set the bag down, walked into the back, and came out with a pallet jack and a pallet of bulbs shrink-wrapped in plastic, the whole fall order that had not sold.

“Marked down to nothing,” Orrin said. “Seven hundred and some. Take them.”

“Orrin, I can’t pay for that.”

“Your mother carried my wife a hot supper every night for six weeks when she was laid up,” he said. “I’d say I’m behind.”

By Wednesday the garden club had heard. Carol Swenson pulled into my driveway with six mesh bags of Dutch tulip bulbs, six hundred of them, sorted by color, and three hundred daffodils besides. “The deer won’t touch a daffodil,” she said. “Yellow in front, tulips behind, and nobody gets hurt.”

Lindgren’s Hardware sent three hundred more with a note that said only, “For Dot.” Neighbors left grocery sacks of their own divided bulbs on my porch, wrapped in newspaper and tagged in pencil. By Friday night Neil had counted two thousand and sixty-one in the garage.

The kids’ jar was on the counter, an old peanut butter jar with a masking tape label in Gabe’s square print. The three of them had emptied it onto the kitchen table on Sunday night and counted it into piles.

It came to a hundred and sixty-eight dollars, from three Octobers of birthday money and a quarter a week, plus eleven dollars in dimes that Lily had added when nobody was looking.

That same Friday, I found my mother’s notebook. I had not been looking for it. I was pulling the last of the bulb boxes off the garage shelf when a green spiral notebook, soft as cloth with age, slid out from behind the box she had ordered that final July.

It was her garden book. Forty years in her round, clear hand. Each fall she had drawn the strip as a long skinny rectangle and marked every row. Red Emperor at the mailbox, 1984.

Pink Impression along the fence, 1991. White Triumphator by the culvert, “because Beth likes them,” 1999. Notes in the margins: Voles got the corner. Rain all week. Put the yellows in front, deer.