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I did not join the merriment when the kids gathered again under the oak in our bare yard. Suddenly I was ashamed, and I did not like being ashamed. The child in me sulked and said it was all in fun, but the woman in me flinched at the thought of the malicious attack that I had led.
This self-reflective passage occurs after the children throw pebbles at Miss Lottie and her flowers. They have often, over the years, tormented and harassed their elderly neighbor, and over the years, Lizabeth has participated without remorse. On this day, when she seems to hang back, Joey goads her into leading the attack by accusing her of cowardice. She is already, though she does not know it, beginning to separate herself from childish behaviors. Lizabeth throws herself into this attack with frenzied anger, relishing her power to affect another person in any way, even to harm her. But now, not only is she overcome with shame, but she cannot talk her way through it. Her mood is miserable, but it will soon enable her to move away from mockery and toward compassion.
Miss Lottie died long ago and many years have passed since I last saw her hut, completely barren at last, for despite my wild contrition she never planted marigolds again. Yet there are times when the image of those passionate yellow mounds returns with a painful poignancy. For one doesn’t have to be ignorant and poor to find that life is barren as the dusty yards of our town. And I too have planted marigolds.
These lines come from the story’s final paragraph and from its frame—the present-day structure that holds the recollected events so that the narrator and readers can consider them. The memory is uncomfortable for Lizabeth, just as the dramatic moments in Miss Lottie’s flowerbed were painful. Time has not eased Lizabeth’s remorse; in fact, she more deeply regrets now the way she hurt her elderly neighbor. Compassion, a word meaning “shared suffering,” depends on empathy or at least sympathy. As a child, Lizabeth could not understand Miss Lottie or her flowers. As an adult, her own experiences of life as barren and dusty, metaphorically, have helped her fathom the effort Miss Lottie expended on her flowers.
The story’s last line is open to interpretation but likely is not to be taken literally. The narrator suggests that she, too, has found ways to create beauty among life’s harsh facts. It may also imply that painful experience has taught her how easily that beauty can be destroyed.
