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.