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.