The Folks

6. The Folks

Part Six The Folks ~ L this week it had been warm. And yet, most of the leaves were gone, showing that it was almost N 0vember . The trees stood branching dark against the blue, and around the heavy trunks the leaves lay thick, yellow and yellow-green, still soft, almost tender, and freshly fallen. But it had been pleasant like this for such a while that Mrs. Morgan didn't feel she ought to trust the weather much longer. Now was the time to look after her plants. Anyway, she wanted to be out here so that she could be sure to go over and say good-bye to the Fergusons. At first she hadn't been able to get down to work, expecting them to come out any minute. But the car stood empty in the driveway between the two houses, ready for the journey. Of course, it always took folks longer to get off than they had planned. Mrs. Morgan was bending down over her flower beds with her back to the street. "Funny she cares so much for flowers. It don't seem to go with the rest of her," Mrs. Viele had once remarked to Mrs. Ferguson. Mrs. Morgan didn't really care for flowers in the way that so many women did; or if so, she stood apart from that naive delight, regarding it with dry harshness touched by humor and holding a strangled sense of defraudment : perhaps most of all with a stringent shyness. She knew it wasn't in keeping with her looks. She could tell herself that better than anyone else could tell her-she wasn't going to give anybody else the chance. People wondered why she had so much nicer flowers than others! Well, because she made a business of it. When anybody suggested that she must have "the knack," Mrs. Morgan scoffed. She said she guessed the knack was just hard work and doing things when they had to be done. She didn't wait around to get Loren to do the hard part for her. She wasn't afraid of getting her hands dirty. A slightly contemptuous, slightly shamed knowledge of these things was always in Mrs. Morgan's mind when other women exclaimed over her flowers. When she worked with them, decorating the lodge hall, or one of the churches for baccalaureate services, she felt awkward and never seemed to fit in; but at any rate, she could supply the decorations! 581 She also took a dry, sardonic pride in keeping the Old Lady Morgan's grave beautifully decorated-who had lived with her and Loren, and who had shown herself plenty feminine. Mrs. Morgan had become so absorbed in her work with the dry, brown, matted plants spread fernlike on the sunwarmed ground that she almost lost the sense of where she was in time. Then she would look up and see the Fergusons' car out there in the driveway, and realize that her neighbors were leaving her. Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson! It didn't seem as if they could have reached the well-known stage of being left alone, with all their children married, or at any rate gone from them, and now getting ready to close up their home and go out to California! Mrs. Morgan had seen plenty of changes come over her street during the thirty-five years she had lived in this house. But it wasn't until now, when the Fergusons were leaving, that she' felt the first real shock of time and change, and thought, It won't be the same any more. A sense oppressive, and yet half ghostly, of slow, subtle, inevitable alterations was all around her, as she stood up, straightening her back, and protesting. It gave her the feeling all at once that so much and so little had come to pass. There had been so few marked happenings in the Morgans' own lives that Mrs. Morgan, with a kind of bleak curiosity, avid, caustic, and yet at bottom not censorious, because of her inner shyness, had noted outside events all the more clearly. She was very likely the most just observer on this street. But this morning all that she saw, in reality or in imagination, was made heightened and strangely moving in the light of her neighbors' departure. She thought of the street as it used to be, years ago, and...