Sweet Everlasting

10

1O The cotton mill owned all the houses in the mill village, and they rented them out to the workers. The houses was small and the yards too, and some of the yards didn't have no grass on them. When we first moved in, ours had a few patches of scragglygrass, but that just made the yard look worse than if it was completely bare. Susan dug it all up and planted new grass and started her a flowerbed. At first she used seeds and bulbs she bought in town at the hardware store, and her garden looked pretty much likeeverybody else's, only bigger. And then as time went on she put to use what she'd learned from her Aunt Lenora about how to take wildflowers from just about anywhere and make them take root there in your own garden. Her aunt had made a real study of it and she'd passed it on to Susan. We didn't hardly ever go for a walk or a ride without having to stop and look and maybe uproot or cut something or try to get some seeds. It didn't take long for folks to take notice of how pretty Susan's flower bed was. She'd have flowers in there that nobody had ever seen anywhere except on the side of the road or out in a field or in the woods. And she'd put in what folks had only thought of as weeds, but when those flowered, they'd be as pretty as anything else. I can't begin to tell you how she done it, only that it wasn't easy and it wasn't something that just come natural. One thing I do know is that her Aunt Lenora kept a notebook on her garden, and she had taught Susan how to do that. She'd write down everything 84 about what she'd done —what the flower's name was; where she had got it from and when; what kind of dirt she'd found it in and if it was growing good there; how many she'd planted, and how many come up, and what they looked like and how long they bloomed and what kinds of seeds they dropped. She'd try out all different kinds of things, and she'd write down whether or not anything made a difference. People come around to see Susan's flower bed, and they went on about what a wayshe had with plants, like it was some God-given talent—which part of it surely was— but what they didn't know was how much of it was plain hard work that took paying close attention and writing things down and learning from what you done wrong or right the last time. Anyway, Susan got a reputation as being good with flowers because her flower bed was alwaysso pretty and because nobody else had one that looked anything at all like it. Mainly, she wanted it to look like it was all wild and had just sprouted up there, but without it looking too wild. She'd scatter the flowers and the weeds around and made the garden look like it had just happened. In her notebook, she'd write down how the flowers come up when they grew in the wild—whether or not they grew in clumps or was scattered around—and she'd try to make the garden look just the way it naturallywould. Every year the flower bed got prettier and prettier, and more wild-looking. Every year it had new colors and new blooms at different times of the year, which was one of the things she worked hardest at—to almost alwayshave something blooming. When the garden was about five years old, a man come around from the Atlanta Constitution. He'd been driving around through the countryside talking to folks and taking pictures for a story he was getting ready to do on people's flower gardens. He wasn't really 85 looking in Red Oak but had just stopped off there to buy him a CoCola . Old John Carlyle down at the gasstation had struck up a conversation with him and had naturally found out what he was doing there, what his business was, where he'd been, and where he was headed. If he'd stayed there long enough, old John...