I Remember The Flowers

The night that Daddy’s body lay in the parlor was one of the worst nights of my life. We’d all been visiting to people’s houses before and seen dead folks in the parlor, but this was Daddy. Momma said that since so many folks were there, Claude and Mavis and me could go down to Grandpa’s for the night. It was a good thing for us, because I heard later that Uncle Milt and Daddy’s sisters sat up crying all night, and I know we couldn’t have slept with all that going on in the house. We didn’t sleep much anyway. While I remember a lot about life after Daddy died, I can't remember anything about the funeral. It was held at church, and Uncle Milt preached the sermon. They tell me he said words over the grave, but I can’t remember. I do remember that Claude and me had only overalls and a dress shirt to wear, because we didn’t have any Sunday clothes that fit, but that’s really all I remember. Perhaps that's because a six-year-old has a way of dealing with things differently than adults do. Whatever the reason, my mind draws a blank, so that must have been God's way of taking care of me. I do, however, remember the flowers. Even in the wintertime there were flowers for Daddy’s grave. Aunt Ella said that most of them came from hot houses down in Florida. There were mums and carnations, and I think a few others that smelled like Aunt Ella’s perfume. Flowers everywhere, and yet for all their beauty, they were already dying before our very eyes, just like Daddy had done. For two or three days after the funeral, the house smelled like those flowers. We left some at the grave site, but the rest we brought home and kept in the parlor. I suppose flowers would have been nice if they hadn’t been a reminder that Daddy was gone. After about a week, they started to smell stale and I begged Momma to throw them out. After the funeral we had plenty of food (more than we could eat) for about a week. The church ladies all took turns bringing us meals, and it gave Momma a chance to keep getting better. After about a week though, the food stopped coming. All my aunts and uncles had to go home, so it was just us and Momma left in the house. Winter had just begun, and already we had lived through a terrible tragedy.