WHERE ARE MY FLOWERS

It might have been May when the Day Lilies were flourishing up in Audubon Park.  I might have been eleven, which would make Charlie nine, Mulry eight, and John L. seven.

It was a Saturday towards the end of the school year, when all of us were in Our Lady of Lourdes grade school. Since it was Saturday, around nine-thirty or so, our mother would have pointed OUT! and we knew to walk up to Audubon Park, where the Day Lilies would be massive and enticing.

So we walked the two or three miles up to the park and then decided that our mother would appreciate some of these lilies and since they were in massive  bloom and no one seemed to be looking, we collected an armful of the lilies and started home.

On the way, though, our collective conscience—or the eldest’s conscience acting solo—felt that perhaps Mercy Tetlow would just as well not have lilies heisted from the park. So, we did the obvious thing and threw them all into the ditch, which at that time, was a good wide ditch running beside the street not-yet-blacktopped but paved in little white Rangia clams.  Then, our consciences eased, we headed home.

In the kitchen, where red beans and rice were steaming on the stove, our mother looked at us as we trooped in empty-handed. In a tone of voice that disguised nothing and revealed nothing, our mother asked calmly, “Where are my flowers.”

After we recovered, we were told that one of the good ladies along that white-shelled street thought she ought to let our mother know about her flowers in the ditch. All I can remember some eighty-odd years later is not the lesson or the penalties but her question.  “Where are my flowers?”