Old Lady Bowman's



worm poop


In the summer, kids would always walk over to Old Lady Bowman's house on their way to the creek. That's because she had this piece of old carpet at the end of her tomato row.
Every day she'd put all the grounds from Old Man Bowman's coffee under there, egg shells and all. That's why they was the fattest red wigglers around. Before the winter when everything stopped, Old Lady Bowman brought them worms indoors. She'd take and put
them into this wash tub in the basement where their root cellar was.
By spring all them worms would be gone and there'd just be this fluffy black powder that smelled like the ground under the leaves in the woodlot. Them coffee grounds and eggshells would be rich fertilizer for the year's tomato plants and carrot seeding. She even put them on that big spider plant in the parlor and on her geraniums.
She called them worm castings.
The summer kids called them worm poop

Rachel Loves’

bleating hearts
Mostly it’d be on the porch. In the summer it was after the chores was done, dishes washed up, before the mosquitoes was too bad, still light. Sometimes a barefoot girl’d stand on the bottom step while Rachel Loves dried red hands on her apron and then put them on her hips. Mostly young women, newly weds or homely, ones not so much wanting to be told advice as just to have someone to listen to them.
Even in winter, a girl’d start by standing there in the cold. They usually showed up at the same time, but in winter it was in the dark and instead of ginghams they wore cloth coats, barn boots if they had them. Rachel Loves never disappointed even one lovelorn girl. Old Mrs. Loves would wring her hands in that apron until tears froze on both their faces and then she’d ask her in.
The house had a parlor, where nobody let children play, where Mister Loves knew enough not to smoke so he didn’t go much, the room the Reverend sat when he had to come. The parlor had a table between two upholstered chairs and the hankies was in the drawer.

Rachel Loves didn’t weep, she bawled. She wailed with the women and groaned with the girls. They sounded like ewes in the lambing barn. They’d cry together until they both felt better. Then small matters was what they talked about as they calmed down. Always ended with Rachel Loves giving the girl some roots from her bleating hearts. That’s how the same ones got everywhere on Loves Road.

Matilda Jacks’

yellow irises

There was cats everywhere. Most farmers just let them run wild. Gave them some sour milk or table scraps, but the dog mostly got those. So some places had a lot of cats until the distemper come along and killed a bunch of them. Then they just started building up again, kittens everywhere.

People said Matilda Jacks’ cats was special cats. For one thing they was big. Not just long legged like some toms you see. These was almost dog sized some of them. With thick tales and mostly no stripes. Like them mountain lions.

And their eyes. The Jack’s house was on the way to town across the road from the cemetery. One side was tomb stones and the other was that cutbank people would walk thru the cemetery to avoid at night. They said you could see the eyes of them cats glowing in the dark. Yellow eyes.

The same people, walking by in the day time, could easily see that them eyes was just Matilda Jacks’ yellow irises on that cutbank. They may have been brightest in May sunshine, but people said they was there all year round after dark.

Martha Flowers’

white pineys
Most of the white pineys you see around come from the county home and Martha Flowers was the one what planted them there. That was probably when she worked there. The older one, the boy was still at home but working steady most of the time. The girl was still in high school.
Then, all of a sudden it seemed, she was all alone and maybe forgetting things? Oh yes, the girl wasn’t coming over as often now because she had children of her own and a husband to cook for. The boy was driving truck and hardly saw his own family let alone her. Pretty soon he up and moved them to some place in Indiana with the grandkids. She was still at the county home, volunteering, her gloves on, planting all those white pineys.
She planted them just deep enough, just barely burying them. First year slow, second year grow, and
third year show. She especially liked to see them through the county home windows. White pineys blooming in mid spring.
The county home wasn’t sure whether they could take her when there was no one else, being as her father was part Chinese. After all that time working there and all that time volunteering, she might as well move in just so she’d be closer to her pineys. They figured from the way she looked a little, but especially the way she said pineys came from China. Something about the way she said it.

Nancy Harries’

grapes

It wasn’t that she was a drunk. True she was the only woman who took a flask to church. At least she didn’t ask to borrow nobody’s. In June it was dandelion wine, sometimes with her own honey and sometimes with store bought sugar. Even with sorghum once. Awful stuff.

In August it was elderberry. You could tell from her purple hands. September was mead and October was concord and catawba wines. In November she had the copper for some brandy and even occasional mash but the weather often was too cold to ferment right.

But three months of winter got her listless and sad seeming. People said it wasn’t until the April grape hyacinths that she perked up. Just the word grape. Even though sometimes Mr. Harries had to fill her flask from town, the sweet grape scent of those big blue irises in June kept her spirits up until the next dandelion summer.

Mrs. D. Teeter’s

zinnias
When she read in the farm journal where you could save zinnias and how to do it, Mrs. Teeter just started growing more and more. By that time the kids was gone, at least out of the house even with that boy Skippy of theirs always in trouble after Mister Teeter passed on. She’d convinced Mister Teeter to put the store out of town, not compete directly with Dale Linscott’s already on the corner of Main Street. When he sold the store years later, they was already pretty comfortable you’d say, what with her buying and selling land and him owning the store nearer to the farmers on that side.
It started with a long row one summer right after Mister Teeter left us. All different colors. A couple of summers after that, zinnias was all there was in her garden. She said she’d been canning all her life and she just quit. She had enough sweet corn and beans and tomatoes from people who brought her their too-manys. That was twenty rows, a hundred fifty feet each, all mixed up with colors like nothing else. Zinnias.
After she planted all the wheelbarrows and inside-out tires, old cream separators and clawfoot bathtubs with zinnias, she brought in an old buckboard and filled it up.
Every September she made a pact with a goldfinch so they’d both have enough, the bird for the next winter, she for the next summer.

Marjorie Driggs’

blood red peonies
Marjorie Driggs was a Jenkins. Where she got them red peonies, no one knows. Seemed like she never spent enough time home to raise no flowers. But these red peonies, so red, mm-mm.
Just down the hill from her house, the big sandstone blocks of the bridge ends was there and then the county didn’t put up no bridge. Mr. Driggs was a drinker so he rigged up a dutchman’s bucket, that washtub contraption you stand in and pulley yourself across Federal Creek. That was his shortcut.
But being a drunk, people figure he beats on her. Story goes that she arranges with her brother to come for her and her things. The brother leaves the buckboard down the road and makes his way through the corn Mr. Driggs grows almost up to the house.
The moment he steps into sight, Mr. Driggs shoots him dead in the chest with a shotgun.
Marjorie runs to the dutchman’s bucket and starts to pull herself across. She’s hit. In the buttocks. Blood drips through the cracks in the tub. She never came back.
Then other people say she didn’t have no flowers except those red peonies because she was running around. You just never know.

Lorinia Allen’s

marigolds

Marigolds is another flower that needs you is what Lorinia said. Some don’t. Easter lilies, nekkid ladies, forsythia, lily of the valleys. They just grow by themselves and spread if the conditions is right.

But marigolds, maybe she didn’t want to buy them next year, more really for the fun of having her own seeds though, she collected the seeds and cared for them. She would rub the warm ripe flower heads between her thumb and finger to until the seeds came out. Miss Allen would hold them in her hand for a while. Then she’d let them dry before she put them in a jelly jar to keep away the mice.

Lorinia had a hotbed and a cold frame. Every year she had the neighbor kids dig out the hot bed in the fall so they could fill it with fresh manure in January so she could start the marigold seeds in flats in April. She’d sow them pretty thick because not all of them sprouted. When it warmed up, she moved them to the cold frame. She always managed to keep it from getting too hot in the day or too cold at night by opening or closing the cold frame.
The frost date around here is May 10th so she’d wait a week after that before she planted them on the borders of their lawn, around their tomato plants, and in with their beans.
She taught third grade. Everyone said she was the best teacher. They remembered how good they felt around her. She never had no kids of her own. Her and Mrs. Calentine’s older sister, the one that taught fourth grade. They lived together in that nice old house for years.

Jane Linscott’s

flowering onions
Buddhists don’t eat onions. They don’t eat leeks, no chives, scallions or shallots. If they have them ramps growing in their woods, they don’t eat them neither. Not because they don’t want to fart. It’s because they don’t want to get excited.
With eight kids, it was pretty difficult to get excited when Mister Linscott did, so Jane Linscott inquired old women when she could. They was surprised she hadn’t noticed for herself and let her know they didn’t think she was too bright. Wasn’t she and the mister ever asked out for dinner?
Well, yes they certainly was she told them, but needed their help.
Think, they said. The Slaters, their youngest, Burt, is going on ten this summer. Zeigler’s baby is eight. Any family who ain’t having babies no more, you ever had any onions at their house? And you never had no salt petered ham there neither. Them women feed their husbands so much ham every other time that something else’s a relief when they have people over. Don’t give him no onions. Get rid of them all. Don’t have none in the garden or the bin or he’ll miss them and want them. If he don’t see none he won’t miss them.
She nodded but when she left, she saw onions growing right next to the walk. They had little yellow flowers that made them look like tulips. Jane Linscott said what about these you got here, right where the mister can see them.
Them’s flowers. Men don’t see flowers, they said as if she should know that too.

Harriet Yunkins’

bridal wreath
Harriet was always planning socials. She lived in town. Where the houses was close enough to each other and there was other women close enough to talk with. She didn’t have as many chores as her two sisters who married farmers. That meant she had time to plan how the fourth of July would go, for example. The picnic and all. Potato salad. Graduation. Vanilla ice cream.
People actually came to her with their lists for their christenings and wakes. She would remind them to get more forks or to decide in advance who was going to clean up. She had a way about her that didn’t make people feel she was bossy. When she was in charge, so to speak, what needed done got done.
That’s why people was so surprised when she just couldn’t do anything for her own daughter’s wedding. Folks had to do it for her. You know how bridal wreath kind of, not droops, but bends nice? Harriet Yunkins’ bridal wreath looked real nice up there in the front of the church. White.

Hannah Nannan’s
foxgloves
Hannah Nannan’s foxgloves was as tall as she was. And she looked kind of like them. Pointy and bright at the top. Flouncy and plain at the bottom. And wider there too.
You know how some people take up much more space than they actually inhabit? That was Hannah Nannan. She was short, but her energy charged a field of activity around her. Ideas, opinions, facts, projects, meals, children in a quantum blur. People remembered her as much bigger than the tall spikes of her patchwork colored foxgloves.
Her hair came to a point at the top of her head as if to antenna her broadcast. But she was bright. “Windy,” was what she called herself. But witty was what other people thought. Partial to smocked bodices and backs, she was. Each tuck sometimes a different pastel.
Dark skirts, full enough to cover a figure built broad. Mr. Nannan’s children, letting herself go, no more exercise than chores and housekeeping and her garden, there bending to the foxgloves, it was quite a profile from the back.

Loisa Hines’
lilies of the Valley
People say Loisa Hines was a white glove women. By that they mean for one thing that she liked to keep house clean. White glove clean. Every once in a while, they say, somebody from church would drop by. Or the boy who hauled those groceries all the way out there. He walked into the kitchen for a drink. People say everybody said it as as clean as clean could be. Even if she wasn’t expecting nobody.
And from family pictures you can see that she was a white glove woman in another way. She’s always the one looking dressed right. Most people looked as if they was wearing costumes. Depending on when the picture was taken, in a plain cotton dress, or later in what must have been a very fashionable gown almost, she looked at the camera as if she knew you’d be looking at the picture. And in every one, in her left hand, almost covered by her right, white fingers pointing up, she held gloves.
But one old man said when he was a little boy, it was the way Miz Hines smelled. “You know how some smells are only right for some times of year? Leaves in the fall, Black powder on the fourth. Turkey, lawns, cabbage cooking. Miz Hines always smelled of lily of the Valleys.” You could hear the capital V.

Emma Calentine’s
Easter flowers
Town is a couple of days away, coming and going, with the cost and discomfort of staying over thrown in. So peddlers with what she can’t make herself, lamp oil, salt, calico, tools, peddlers are important. And this autumn, one of those peddlers has daffodil bulbs.
He promises plain yellow, like kids draw daffodils. And one called pheasant eye, with a flattened orange cup on petals that blush where they join the center. A droopy, three bloomed kind, glowing an ivory color that’s ordinary until you smell its fragrance and something far away comes to mind. A purchase worthy of her secret horde of egg and butter money, coins separate from the sparse family budget.
She buys a just a few bulbs like individual hopes for a glorious spring after a mild winter. Mrs. Calentine plants her bulbs where she’ll get to enjoy them in April, near the kitchen door. Far enough from the sandstone foundation that they’ll get some sun and rain, but near enough so the kids and Mr. Calentine won’t tramp on them. People call them Easter flowers.

Cynthia Ginn’s
coneflowers
Women would come to Cynthia Ginn for all sorts of help. Someone or some child got kicked by the cow when they was milking, Cynthia would know how to put the comfry on to draw the bruising out. She had mullen and coltsfoot to smoke if a body’s lungs was feeling poorly. Going through the change, they’d tell her things they wouldn’t tell no man doctor, Cynthia’d make up little pills of cohosh for them.
Sometimes even men would come for her ginseng. They could get it themselves in the woods all around. They might bring a few man shaped roots in their pockets. It was how she fixed it that they believed in. Sometimes a little hemp flower in it. When they needed it. Wives would bring it too. She never said nothing to nobody about nobody.
People who didn’t already know learned about plantain for stings, jewel weed for poison ivy, slippery elm for sore thoat, catnip for colicy babies.
Teas, tinctures, extracts, powders, smokes, poltices.
But the only one she took everyday herself was a moonshine tincture of coneflower root. Just a teaspoon full. All them sick people coming to her and she never got sick. She said it was the coneflowers.

Charlotte Humphry’s
columbine
People say she always carried a shovel and a notebook in the back wherever she went. The shovel was to dig up flowers that she liked. Different ones at different times of the year. Like in the spring she’d dig up what she called pinks. They was the reddest red, but she called them pinks. The note book was to write down where they was growing, a cut with the soil raw from the road grader or from the picks and shovels of the county. Pretty shaded, not too dry. So she could plant them in the same sort of place. She loved that book.
Daisies, what she called tiger lilies, chicory, milkweed, mullen, filled different spots in her front yard. Periwinkle, she got from Blanche
People made fun of her because they said she was collecting weeds that their husbands was trying to keep out of the fields. Pigweed, ironweed. Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod.
Columbine with a flower that must be what a meteor looks like up close. Just about blue blending into orange with those flaming vermillion tails. You see them growing along the roads.
That was until the summer her neighbor Mrs. Diggers got her some seeds from the catalog and grew columbine the palest yellow all over. After that, Charlotte Humphry just grew store bought seeds. Or from a peddler.

Catherine Cather’s calendula
Catherine Cather was one of those women who liked words. Take calendula for instance. She just liked to say words like caLENdyula. And radulate that sounds a little bit like caLENdyula. She knew the meanings too. Whenever she saw a slug eating a lettuce leaf in her garden, she would tell people it was radulating.
She knew the names for things. Like where critters lived. Instead of calling them all nests, she would would always point out to people that squirrel’s mew or that spider’s nidus. She knew the words for where animals and birds live: aeyrie, den and lair. What you were really to call different kinds of baby birds: squabs and cygnets and keets.
She planted flowers in her garden that had interesting names and she knew where those names came from. Foxgloves like the ones she got from Mrs. Nannan, called that because they look like smart little mittens for the one sly enough to use them. Nekkid ladies. Everybody knows why they’re called that. Periwinkle. If you don’t live near no ocean, she says, you can’t imagine the shells. Black eyed Susan. Lily of the Valleys, Rose.
But calendula was her favorite. Called calendula, she told people, because it always starts blooming on the same calendar day every year. April first.

Blanche Ziegler’s

forsythia
Blanche Ziegler was born in the house. The yellow forsythia were the first time, as a little girl, she realized that there were seasons. She remembered loving them the year before. So her mother must have planted them.
It was just the beginning of awareness of all sorts of cycles and episodes. The Clarks had a lot of kids and Blanche noticed that when Mrs. Clark got fat in front, she would have another baby.
She learned that not only was there a forsythia spring, there was an iris summer and a fall. She noticed that noonday shadows are shorter in June and July, that when the sun rides high, the moon rides low.
Blanche’s mother must have planted them. Blanche never asked. Up close to the road, they shielded the house from the dust and the noise and the wagons. After the spring’s cascade of brilliant yellow blossoms, the arching branches covered great hiding places.
Sometimes men are worse than the deer. Blanche married Roy and he came to live in her aging mother’s house. He was trying to make a good impression, trimming back those untidy forsythia bushes by the road.
Blanche’s mother never spoke to him again, even though cutting them back like that made them bloom better a couple of springs later when Blanche gave the old lady a grand daughter and a vase of brilliant yellow blossoms.

Almira Balcom's nekkid ladies

Almira Balcom's
nekkid ladies
The women at Mt. Herman church, if they mentioned them at all, said surprise lilies. But they looked away when they said it. The Alter Society matrons called them resurrection plants. Even THEM old hens cackled when they answered, because they was thinking about the real name of them tall pink flowers, what they all knew they was really called. And Almira Balcom should know.
You got them from family or neighbors like Almira who had a lot of them near the pond, hardly ever from those rascal peddlers coming by with supplies. Tall Almira.
Their house was set back, the lane curved so you couldn’t see her if you minded your own business and didn’t look. The pond was behind. People say from the time she was a little girl in that house, she run out and dove in every morning, and the winters get cold here.
That’s how she met Mister Balcom. He let himself get caught hiding in the flowers watching her. Soon as they married, he wanted her to stop, cleared places where people might try to watch, cut down the naked ladies.
‘Til SHE was an old lady, every once in a while, people admitted to watching long Almira’s trim pink body break the water.