It was finally spring, my favorite season! The sun was shining, birds were chirping, and all around me I saw flowers blooming. Grandma’s garden was bursting with life, and I couldn’t wait to see what we would plant this year.
“Lila! Come here, dear. I need your help!” Grandma always called me dear when she wanted something. I rushed down the path to her little garden. “Today, we need to plant some flowers.”
“Okay! What are we planting?” I asked excitedly.
“First, we need to dig some holes,” she replied. “Then, I will show you how to plant the young flowers so they will grow good and strong.”
We took a big shovel between us and started digging. Well, Grandma did most of the digging, if I am to tell you the truth. My arms are quite small yet, and she was much stronger. I offered help and support with the digging, but I couldn’t have done it without Grandma’s big, strong hands.
“That’s enough digging for today also,” she said at length, wiping her forehead. “I could show you how to plant the young flowers.”
I picked up a young flower and rather awkwardly tried to plant it. The hole did not stay open when I let the flower down and I spilled a lot of earth on the flower itself.
“No, no, dear!” cried Grandma, gently lifting the flower out and brushing off the earth. “Like this! Well that’s right.”
I got better at it, noticing what I had done wrong after each time. By the time they were all planted and had a little water poured on them, I thought I was a very good gardener.
“I think we shall have a beautiful garden after a little while,” said Grandma. “And don’t forget, Lila dear, the flowers will not grow simply by our putting them into the earth or watering them. We must make sure to take care of them every day, taking loose the earth round the plant sometimes, and keeping the weeds out.”
I forgot about sweeping out my sand and willow house and turned all my attention to the garden. I went there every little bit, and watched to see if they were getting any larger, and used to sit down peacefully and pull up weeds, if any dared to appear.
At last I had a flower of my own: one little primrose which I had planted myself. We called it Lila, of course, and she looked very flourishing in some earth in a flower-pot which Grandma gave me.
“It brings good luck to have a flower growing which is named after you, I think,” she said with a smile.
I put the flower-pot on the window-sill looking into our little yard. Next morning it was a little blinking, smiling face which I opening my eyes. I jumped up from my bed and ran to the window to give it a good-morning kiss.
I had this good-morning kiss, at least, for a whole week! Then when I got up one morning I found that little Lila was drooping and dying. O, how I cried!
“Never mind, dear,” said Grandma, trying to be cheerful. “It snowed last night, you know, and Lila Little did not like the cold. You shall have some flowers this afternoon from a little girl who will bring you some different flowers.”
About mid-day I received a pretty bouquet, but I am afraid I didn’t love her as I had the flower that had grown so nicely from my own hands. In the first joy of receiving them, however, I looked up and said: “Yes, I will.”
This seemed so nonsensical to Grandma that she laughed. “What will you do, granddaughter?” she asked.
“Make a little garden in my sand and willow house,” I said. “If the sun only comes out it will soon melt away the snow. Only give me the flowers, little girl, and I will take them there at once.”
“But that will be very much trouble to you, I think,” she replied, smiling. “Can you not try and keep the flowers in the house, instead?”
O yes, I could do that. Then I went to bed again as all doctors assert children should do, turning their backs to the light, if they wished to get well quickly. Besides, I did not think it precisely polite to go to work when I had so many lady companions wishing to see how the process of getting roses and daisies in one’s sand house was done.
Besides my bouquet I had received a book on “Plants and Flowers.” I sat down with it and looked at my garden till I was as sure of it as if I had been there.
That day I thought I should very shortly have a pretty little garden on the window-sill, but I could do little that afternoon or the whole of the next day without lying down again. Thus the poor flowers were kept shut in the book for a day or two, and, tucked up as they were, began to think they were in their peaceful earth again.
It seemed to me, however, to be a matter of course that when I wanted something it was to be done at once. I had forgotten to send even a single email to thank the little girl who had remembered me.
“Much obliged indeed for the flowers!” I still managed to write to her—“but they were so overpowering they put me to bed. I am going to try and take the roses to my sand and willow house again. I only want a little rain to help me.”
Dear me! The window was wide open because it was so hot! I only need to creep out of bed among my growing pansies and stuck-in-roses and they would be still nicer.
In those countries almost all things which grow hold to the one-woman system in general; except in a few skirtless islands, out-at-the-corners families are comparatively rare.
The pansy bough in the garden was bound here and there, and the rain had been able to produce its usual effects and keep this little monkey-like sort of flower greenish and nice, even yet. I bent down and crept right in, taking also care to shut the window directly behind me.
Everything was humid, humid as an island of the tropics after the sun had risen, ripe for a splendid plant-growth. Only when I tried to hold down my skirt underneath me it got blown by the wind over my little house. My dress had a most inconceivable fuddled sort of colour after four hours of rain, so I took the opportunity for saying that I should be out better in the ‘drippier’ weather.
Arranging the lovely flowers of all colours and when-mixed, they cost so much, three hours passed without my thinking of the time racing.
The clock warned me, too, that the sun was out again. Now it would soon finish the work it had begun in the morning—“the trine.”
I was really in a hurry. Then I thought that I could go in a minute if I only lapped up my skirt properly. Alas! I forgot to keep one of the ends hanging down from the window to step on, which consequently caught on tight round a branch.
We cautiously broke it. Helas tout de même! The curtain was broken off the rod for a little covering to go on to bed comfortably again.
On the line whence I took it, however, it was bamboo. I threw the frays over the window again until the little girl, examined rather critically by others, should give me something to go to bed in more comfortable.
I became more and more angry at my own carelessness, for in a moment perhaps Lila, after the light treatment, would be wide awake again. My lady visitors wanted to go to the willow house and see if I was well yet.
I was very indignant at my own cause compelling these ungrateful girls to go, moreover, into what I could scarcely call a decent house.
“There’s nothing at all the matter with you, I see now,” they said, half suspiciously.
I spent a restless night, rolling from side to side. The entire bedding issue I remembered much too late—an elephant had spoiled my willow monochrome of pansies when swinging in it just before I crawled out, and a hundred other suspicious circumstances of a personal nature.
I seemed to have risen early next morning. “How does our sapling of a girl get on?” asked Grandma, half-cleverly and half-sweetly, peeping in before breakfast.
O yes! I was going to take a little turn. I hastily took all teased roots out of my skirt which now outrivalled in crumpling a dreadfully ill-soldered three-cornered sort of one. I knew she was dead. It must even now divine its wicked orphanage since yesterday about eleven.
“Well,” she said, waking me after the long sleep my little brain, half-nervous, half-sick, had well-and-truly required.
Grandma had seen nothing when she came to my bedside.
The little flower was fast asleep!