Free The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree by Susan Wittig Albert

all four cylinders, as Grady liked to say. The law office was on the second floor of the Dispatch building, so when the windows were open, there was usually a bit of a breeze, which brought with it sounds and smells from all along the street. From downstairs came the staccato clackclickity-clack of Charlie Dickens’ typewriter. Next door on the west, tied to the rail in front of Hancock’s Groceries, a horse whinnied—many of the farmers still drove horses and wagons when they came into town to trade butter and eggs and cream for sugar, flour, coffee, and tea. And from the direction of the Darling Diner, next door on the east, came the rich, sweet smell of stewing chicken. Euphoria, the diner’s cook, always made chicken and dumplings on Mondays. Meat loaf, too, but meat loaf wasn’t as aromatic as stewed chicken. The aroma of chicken was overlaid with the scent of warm dust stirred up in the street and the floral perfume of blooming magnolias from the trees around the courthouse.
    Lizzy had a small electric fan beside her desk, but the air was heavy and the fan didn’t do much to cool her off There was still some coffee in the percolator on the gas hot plate in the corner, so she poured a cup to wake herself up, then finished the filing and a few other tasks for Mr. Moseley, who was out of the office for the afternoon. With nothing else to be done, she put a sheet of paper into the Underwood typewriter and began to work on Friday’s piece for “The Garden Gate.”
    Lizzy had been writing the column since Mrs. Blackstone started the garden club five years ago, and it had attracted quite an audience. It wasn’t just garden club news, of course, although there was always lots of that, because club members liked to see their names in print. It also included notes about the plants in local gardens, or wild plants from the woods and fields and streams roundabout. After a while, she decided that readers of the Dispatch must be sending clippings to their friends, because she started getting letters from all over—not just from Alabama, but from Florida and Georgia and Mississippi—asking gardening questions or telling her what they knew about the plants she had written about, or correcting her mistakes, of which there were plenty. The subject was complicated and she was no expert, so she always welcomed readers’ additions and corrections. Sometimes they sent her seeds and bulbs, too, which was nice. She would grow them, or try to, and take photographs to send to the donors.
    This week’s column was what she called a “potpourri,” since it was a collection of short items she had been saving. She was not quite half done with her draft when the tall grandfather clock at the top of the stairs cleared its throat and struck the half hour. Four thirty, and time to go home. She put her work away and straightened her desk, covered the typewriter, checked Mr. Moseley’s office to be sure that everything was shipshape and ready for the next morning, and left, locking the door behind her, both at the top of the stairs and at the bottom, on the street.
    Home was only a few blocks away. East on Franklin outside the Dispatch building, past the diner and Musgrove’s Hardware, across Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis, and left on Davis. Halfway up the block, heading north, she reached her house. Her very own house.
    She was turning up the path when she heard a shrill, quavering “Eliz’beth!” It was her mother, of course, calling from her front porch on the other side of the dusty, unpaved street. She was sitting in her rocking chair, her knees covered with a crocheted granny afghan. “Eliz’beth, Grady stopped by ‘bout an hour ago. He left somethin’ for you. A glass jar of somethin’. On the porch, right there beside the door.”
    “Thank you, Momma,” Lizzy called, and waved, thinking once again that life would be much easier if she had a sister or two, or at least a brother.
    No such luck. Her mother had been nearly