Quick Change

The city is an old woman

with nothing to dress up for,

the country, a young girl

trying on one thing and then another,

skirts of purple knotweed,

scarves of yellow mustard,

ribbons of red clover.

In the mornings after breakfast, Grandmama works in her garden pulling weeds. She ties up the leggy blue larkspur and waters the plants with a sprinkling can she fills from the rain barrel. The water in our faucets is pumped from the lake. “Too cold for the flowers,” Grandmama says.

While she works in her garden, I work in mine. All the vegetables are up, and there are little beans starting. The snapdragons are blooming, too. I picked some to go on the dining room table. Grandmama helped me cage my tomato plants. They are growing so large they can’t hold themselves up, so they go in these wire cages. First there were little yellow flowers all over the plants, and now there are tiny green tomatoes. “Why does it take so long for everything to grow?” I asked Grandmama.

She put her arm around me. It was warm from the sun, and she smelled of the tomato plants, which is a nice smell. “Ach, what is your hurry? Enjoy today. Tomorrow will come soon enough.”

I think she was talking about me and not the tomatoes.

In the fields something amazing is happening. One week the fields are orange with hawkweed, another week gold with mustard. Then they are white with daisies. I think of how hard I have to work to make my small garden grow. These fields, with their thousands and thousands of flowers, stretch as far as your eye can see.

There are flowers that know enough to open their blossoms in the morning and close them at night, as if they were keeping store. There are plants that have special friends: the milkweed flowers are cluttered with fluttering orange butterflies called monarchs. The tall yellow mullein plant has a yellow goldfinch perched on its tip.

I go by the fields on my way into Greenbush to get the mail. No letter has come from the Roths. On the way home the fields are still crowded with flowers. Far away in Germany, too, there are fields of flowers, but if you were my grandparents’ friends the government might forbid you to paint the flowers. It would be like the flowers were taken away from you.

Each time I go into Greenbush I try to keep out of Tommy’s way. Most of the time Tommy’s on the fishing boat with his dad, but today he was sitting on the drugstore steps. When he’s with the other kids he doesn’t pay any attention to me. Today he was alone, so he said, “You want to see something?”

“What?” I wanted to know.

“In Mr. Hatton’s workshop.”

“I don’t care.” Just this morning Grandmama had mentioned a table she admired in Mr. Hatton’s store.

I guess I should have been warned by the sneaky way Tommy prowled around to the back of the furniture store.

“Why can’t we just go in the store?” I asked.

“Because what he’s working on is special, and he doesn’t want anyone to see it.” Tommy climbed up on a wooden crate that was pushed against the back wall of the store. He peered into a window and then motioned to me to climb up next to him.

By standing on my toes and stretching my neck up I could just see into the room. Scattered around the room were hammers and saws and all the stuff carpenters have. In the middle of the room was a sort of table. A man was lying on it. He was very still. “Why is that man sleeping on a table?” I asked Tommy.

“He isn’t sleeping. He’s dead as a doornail. It’s old Mr. Spire. He croaked last night, and Mr. Hatton’s building him his coffin.”

I practically fell off the crate. It was worse than Dracula. “You brought me here to show me a dead man!”

“What’s the matter with that?”

I didn’t even bother to answer him. As far as I’m concerned, he can get in his fishing boat and go to China.