sweaters. I felt emotionally drained and was grateful for the quiet that we shared. I’d never sat on that balcony before, and it felt strange, but the whole weekend had felt strange. Daylight was gone, and summer too, and frost had claimed the garden just days before. The yard looked colorless and drab in the dim light of early dusk. A few dry leaves were scattered on the lawn. From someplace in the pecan grove behind the barn, a mockingbird pierced the silence with its call. My heart ached at the sound, ached with its own need to somehow answer. Again the mockingbird called out, and its familiar notes evoked in me a longing deeper than anything I’d ever felt. It felt like homesickness, but for someplace I’d never known before.
III
Every summer Mother filled a basket with vegetables for me to take to Mrs. Clemons and Mrs. Forbes. She filled it with the bounty from her garden in the backyard or from the hampers of vegetables thatmy father brought home from his produce warehouse: radishes, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, string beans, field peas, okra, carrots, cucumbers. She arranged them with the same care with which she arranged tiger lilies and aspidistra leaves in the brass bowl on the living room mantelpiece or camellias in the low, white bowl on the dining table. While housework defeated her at every turn, Mother was a devoted and creative gardener. More than at any other time, she appeared at peace with herself and the world when she was pulling weeds from a flower bed, planting seeds in the vegetable garden, or pruning the roses. Arranging the vegetables in the basket was one of Mother’s pleasures, and it never went unnoticed by either Mrs. Forbes or Mrs. Clemons.
I loved carrying the basket from the car into the house, anticipating the pleased looks in both women’s eyes when they saw it. On those Saturdays when I brought the basket, Mrs. Forbes announced my arrival by ringing the bell and calling out “Yoo-hoo!” to Mrs. Clemons, who came down and stood with her, admiring the vegetables. This was such a Saturday, and the three of us stood in the foyer looking at Mother’s creation.
“A feast for the eyes,” Mrs. Forbes announced, smiling.
“Lovely,” Mrs. Clemons said. “Just lovely.” Then—being the cook for both of them—she took the basket from me, saying, “I’m baking a cake with chocolate sauce. It should be ready for your lesson break.” I watched her climb the stairs to disappear into the kitchen.
Mrs. Forbes and I went into her workroom, where, for a long time, I worked on a watercolor I’d begun the week before. She sat in her reading chair near the daybed, telling me again about her dream of someday having a book of her own stories, poems, drawings, and watercolors. Then she recited from Emerson’s poem “The Rhodora” from memory, ending with “… beauty is its own excuse for Being.” Afterward she announced, as she usually did, that she intended to live to be a hundred years old before she left for her “scouting space” in the next world.
I sat bent over the little desk, pulling my full paintbrush acrossthe paper, the blue of a summer sky pooling along the horizon line in my watercolor. “And this is another poem I myself wrote,” she announced, smiling: “O Bumblebee Humble Bee / droning and buzzing,” she began, loving the sounds of the words as she said them, as they vibrated against her teeth and out through her lips. “Droning and buzzing so close to me,” she continued, not remembering that she’d said the poem to me more than once already. “I know you think you’re in Paradise / In the wisteria bloom on my porch.”
I laid my paintbrush on the desk. Mrs. Forbes dragged a straight chair over beside me and sat down. We looked at my painting together. Against the blue background sat a dog, a white terrier with a black spot on its shoulder. A gray-and-yellow kitten looked up at its face. It was a sentimental picture copied from one of the prints that