Marigolds at the End of the World

Throughout her lifetime, Maggie had planted thousands of seeds that had grown into hundreds of gardens. During the early years of her marriage, she had planted them for her family to help put food on the table during the lean times. Years later when her daughters went off to college, one of them suggested she turn her green thumb into a small business. With her husband’s support, she quit her job at the local grocery store and began to sell her landscaping services. The business proved quite profitable and she found work planting flowers for busy homeowners and setting up vegetable gardens for schools and youth groups.

When her daughters had children of their own, she knelt in the dirt alongside her grandchildren, teaching them the names of the tiny seeds and bulbs which would sprout into so many colorful flowers come summer. And much later, with a head full of curly gray hair, she had planted a small garden of flowers around her husband’s grave. Blue pansies. It was his favorite color.

But this year’s garden was different. This year it wasn’t about pretty flowers or stretching the food budget or mourning the passing of a good man. This year’s garden was about life or death. Health or starvation.

Because this was the year the world had ended.

“They are out there again.” Jimmy complained. The waning afternoon sunlight slanted sharply across the carpet from where he held the thick blackout curtain open. The once beige berber carpet, which hadn’t seen a vacuum since the power cut off a year ago, was caked in dirt and speckled with pieces of dead grass. There wasn’t much point in taking your shoes off anymore and the house’s original owners wouldn’t be coming back to complain about the mess.

Earl shrugged and didn’t look up from the book he was reading. “Honestly Jimmy it can’t hurt to have some extra, just in case one of the crops fails. And you always got to account for the wildlife taking their share.”

“But they aren’t planting vegetables this time!” Jimmy continued in a tone far too whiny for someone in his late teens.

“Then what are they doing?” Earl finally looked up, his interest now genuinely piqued. He carefully marked his page with a sliver of paper and then gently lay the book on top of the small pile he had amassed on the coffee table. He had forgotten how much he enjoyed reading back when he was stationed overseas. Now that there was no internet to surf, he had taken to the old pastime with renewed enthusiasm. Every time they went out to search the abandoned homes and businesses for food that might have been missed in the initial looting, he checked the book shelves. Stories of far away places and another time now fed his hunger as much as the canned beans which currently made up a good portion of their diet.

“They are planting flowers.” Jimmy gave him a self satisfied look, obviously relishing the attention he was finally getting.

“What?!” Earl got up and pushed the younger man out of the way so that he could peer out the back window. He used a little more force then was necessary and the lanky kid stumbled back. He really couldn’t stand the way Jimmy kissed his ass. It was like the teenager had assigned himself second in command and felt the need to report- no tattle, every detail of what the others did to him. The fervor with which the younger man approached his self-appointed job sickened him; it was a mockery of the responsibility Earl had taken on trying to keep these people safe and alive each day. He had accepted many missions during his military career leading men into battle, protecting those who could not defend themselves, and he had served his country dutifully until his retirement. Somehow though, all of that paled in comparison with the task he now found himself facing. He would keep these people safe. That was his mission now.

Earl scrutinized the backyard. The curls of Maggie’s gray hair and the top of Sarah’s blonde pony tail, along with the dark hair of the eldest of the children could just be seen above the tall grass and weeds. The vegetation had taken over the lawns once mowers were no longer a threat to them. The grass near the figures rustled, giving away the position of the two smaller children, a brother and sister, that were also part of their small, impromptu family. They were the only two who were related by blood, the rest had been brought together by survival and circumstance.

They had laid the garden out in the center of that tangled mess on purpose. It was supposed to act as camouflage. Everything about their new home was designed to appear uninhabited from the road. If a drifter happened to pass by them, Earl wanted them to keep on walking. They were running low on bullets and each one saved would come in handy during the winter when the small game they currently trapped would be more scarce and they might need to hunt larger animals like deer.

The garish yellow and orange of the marigolds they were planting stood out like a neon sign to the seasoned veteran. Every time the wind blew, the green would part just enough to catch a glimpse. There was a time people might have mistook them for brightly colored weeds, but those sorts of people weren’t likely among the survivors anymore.

He sighed. So the old woman had brought flower seeds with her as well? She would probably tell him they were good in tea to get rid of a headache, or something practical like that. Honestly, he had been grateful that someone had thought of them. When the canned goods ran out later in the year, they would all be grateful for her forethought. But flowers? And bright yellow ones at that? This time Jimmy was right to be concerned.

He wondered where in the house she had nurtured them that he hadn’t noticed before now. Probably in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He rarely went upstairs. It was just too hot. Without air conditioning, the summer heat rose to hang there oppressively. It made a good green house. The plants loved the humid warmth, the people not so much.

He was about to go outside to stop them, when he saw the smile on the children’s faces as brother and sister ran hand in hand to fetch more jugs of water from the back patio. Their eyes glowed with delight. It had been a long time since he had seen any of the children smile. Even the dried tear tracks from last night’s round of nightmares were gone, covered with fresh smears of dirt from an afternoon spent playing in the garden.

He regarded the flowers from this new perspective. It was true that they hadn’t seen another person in over a month and he had taken great care to secure the perimeter of the house. He would know the moment someone tried to approach. Perhaps, they needed the colorful plants as much as they did the food. And you only really noticed them when the wind blew, which wasn’t really all that often. It was shaping up to be another stifling summer.

He ignored Jimmy’s sputtering protests and went back to his book.

Maggie helped the eldest of the children pat the earth down around the last marigold stem and then motioned for the two siblings to come water the newly planted row of flowers. They came hand in hand, each carrying a plastic half gallon milk jug from the patio. The mouths of the jugs had been cut wide, leaving their handles intact. An assortment of jugs and plastic bins covered the back patio for catching rain water.

Together they went down the row, still holding hands, watering the flowers, smiling the whole time. They rarely let go of one another, obviously traumatized by the sudden loss of their parents and still fearing losing one another. Maggie quickly looked away choking back her emotions. She had grown very close to the children and the combination of empathy she felt for them and her own grief from losing her two daughters and grandchildren was almost too much to bear.

She glanced up and caught Sarah’s eye. The younger woman, once an elementary school teacher and mother herself, nodded knowingly and quickly distracted all three children while Maggie quietly retreated out of the summer sun and into the shade of the house.

Sarah gazed out the back window as the sun rose casting a golden light on the red and yellow leaves of the autumn trees. She wrapped her blanket more tightly around her shoulders. The mornings were beginning to get chilly and after today’s lessons with the children, Maggie and she would plan out the rest of the harvest before winter came. The older woman had assured her that there were plenty of things they could grow in the cooler weather too and even a few things they could grow inside during the winter months.

Already, the basement was lined with metal shelves, and over the summer as their stock of canned goods began to dwindle, Maggie had taught her how to harvest the vegetables and then preserve them in special glass jars. Now the shelves were full again.

Jars of colorful vegetables sat alongside plastic tubs filled with dried beans and peas. Wooden crates lay waiting for them to pack away the root vegetables they would harvest next month. Other crates were filled to the brim with an assortment of nuts from trees the men had found while out hunting. Several buckets of apples waited in the kitchen to be canned as well. The bounty from a small grove of fruit trees in a backyard a few streets away that the men had only recently stumbled upon. Earl had done the math, there would be enough to get them through the harsh winter and well into the next summer, when another garden would be planted.

Sarah gazed around the bedroom turned classroom. Judging from the impersonal decor and furniture that had been in here, it had served the previous owners as a rarely used guest bedroom. She had claimed it shortly after they had arrived, deciding that the children needed a classroom. That she needed a classroom. She taught them math and science and reading for a few hours each day. It was a good way to bring back a sense of normalcy in all of their lives.

Teaching was all she knew. It was all she had ever wanted to be. She had only been a teacher for 5 years when shit hit the fan, but already she had touched hundred’s of young lives. She wondered how many of those children were alive now and how many had met the fate of her son.

Sarah shook off the dark thoughts and turned to preparing the classroom for the day. Maggie would soon be waking the children and getting them dressed. From the delicious aroma coming from the direction of the kitchen she knew Jimmy was starting breakfast. The teenager was insufferable at times, had refused all her attempts to include him in her classroom, but man, was he a good cook! He could take anything they gave him and make an edible meal out of it.

Everyone had found a place in their home, a role they filled. Hers was teacher and the three students she had were now the most important of any that came before them. She carefully began going through the many drawings the children had posted on the walls. She slid the older, darker drawings out from behind the newer ones and gently peeled the tape from them, sticking it on the side of the windowsill to preserve it for another use.

After a few moments of this she had a thick stack in her hands and she flipped through them. Shortly after they had arrived here she had encouraged the children to draw. All three were suffering from nightmares and none wanted to talk about what they had seen or been through. Drawing proved to be a good therapy for them, but the drawings were dark, disturbing things and soon the black markers were out of ink, the black crayons nothing more then nubs. Every time they went out, Earl would look for more art supplies for the children. He understood the long term effects of trauma better then any of them.

Sarah had confided in Maggie that she worried she didn’t have the experience or knowledge to help them. She had seen plenty of troubled children in her classroom, but there was always a counselor on hand to see to them. Now she would have to fill both roles, if she wanted her students to thrive. That was when Maggie suggested having the children help in the garden. And slowly, as the garden grew, color crept back into their pictures. Then Maggie brought out the marigolds. Shortly after, the black and red markers lay abandoned and Earl was on the hunt for more orange, yellow, and green.

Those were the pictures she left up on the wall as she slid the darker ones into a drawer in her desk. She felt it was important to keep them, for her to remember the past, but she wanted to surround the children with the present and the promise of the future.

The garden was dark now. Covered in a heavy blanket of snow. The children had long ago run out of paper, but Earl had hoarded every conceivable paint, marker, and pen for them for the long winter. They had been turned loose on the walls to pass the time and they giggled as they completed their latest mural near the fireplace. Sarah sat in a corner with a stack of lesson plans beside her while she graded the children’s tests. He didn’t see much point in that, but it made her happy and the children seemed to enjoy ‘going’ to school. Maggie quietly stitched on the other sofa, repairing some article of clothing that had been torn. Behind her, on an old entertainment system, rows of jars were neatly lined up and just as neatly labeled. They contained the seeds for next year’s garden. An old pickle jar, big enough to put your entire fist in, held hundreds of black and white needle like seeds. It was labeled Marigolds.

Most days it was too bitterly cold to go outside. Earl’s pile of books now overtook the coffee table and the side tables and spilled onto the floor. He had even managed to get Jimmy interested in reading and the younger man had a small stack of cookbooks he wouldn’t allow anyone else to touch. The younger man had also begun insisting they call him Chef. Chef Jimmy was currently finishing up preparing the evening meal. Earl had to admit, the smell had his mouth watering. Despite the situation, they were all eating better then ever.

As they all huddled around the big fireplace in the living room, a thick curtain of snow falling outside, their small family feasted on an assortment of vegetables and the fresh venison Earl had brought back that morning. The tangy smell of fresh paint hung in the air from the children’s latest masterpiece. The wall around the fireplace was now covered in a field of bright orange and yellow flowers. Throughout her lifetime Maggie had planted thousands of seeds that had grown into hundreds of gardens, but none of those gardens had been quite as important as this past year’s.