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When I think of the hometown of my youth, all that I seem to remember is dust—the brown, crumbly dust of late summer—arid, sterile dust that gets into the eyes and makes them water, gets into the throat and between the toes of bare brown feet. I don’t know why I should remember only the dust. Surely there must have been lush green lawns and paved streets under leafy shade trees somewhere in town; but memory is an abstract painting—it does not present things as they are, but rather as they feel.
The narrator opens the story by setting the scene for the unknown person to whom she is speaking in his or her absence—the person she waits for hopelessly and whose absence causes her to recall the marigolds. She says that “all I seem to remember is dust”; she knows that she also experienced seasons of snow and ice in Maryland. Winter is, in fact, “imminent” as the events of the recollection take place, and in the homes Lizabeth describes, winter brought its own depredations. Likewise, she surely remembers springs—but in her memory, only the dust remains. The dust represents lack of growth and opportunity, and this is what Lizabeth feels as a child on the cusp of womanhood, which is supposedly a time of excitement and hope. The dust literally impedes what Lizabeth, as a teen, could see in the same way that poverty clouds the vision of what the community’s people can envision for their children’s future. As she points out, they worked hard despite knowing that the “American Dream” was not theirs to claim.
We children, of course, were only vaguely aware of the extent of our poverty. Having no radios, few newspapers, and no magazines, we were somewhat unaware of the world outside our community. Nowadays we would be called “culturally deprived” and people would write books and hold conferences about us. In those days everybody we knew was just as hungry and ill-clad as we were.
As Lizabeth continues to set the scene in which the events she will retell occur, she describes the community’s isolation and its solidarity, conditions that reinforce each other for the children. Largely cut off from outside sources of news, and unaware of the economic devastation of the Great Depression, the children live in a world of their own making while their parents struggle to provide. Conditions are in fact so harsh that Lizabeth’s older siblings have fled to cities, seeking opportunities, and her youngest siblings have been sent to relatives’ homes. Even within her family, she is disconnected, not only from siblings but from her silent father and her mother, who gets back from work too late to be with her children. Isolated and starved for connection with families and the outdoor world, the children bond to each other like castaway survivors on an island. One reason that Lizabeth’s loss of innocence is so jarring, in fact, is that this bond has begun to loosen for her, and she feels adrift in her restlessness.
Miss Lottie’s house was the most ramshackle of all our ramshackle homes. The sun and rain had long since faded its rickety frame siding from white to a sullen gray. The boards themselves seemed to remain upright not from being nailed together but rather from leaning together, like a house that a child might have constructed from cards. A brisk wind might have blown it down, and the fact that it was still standing implied a kind of enchantment that was stronger than the elements.
On the one hand, Miss Lottie’s house, which Lizabeth describes after Joey suggests having fun by annoying the old woman, partakes of the same decay and stagnation as the rest of the community. On the other, this house—with its porch and marigolds—also suggests defiance. It is the one place in the larger setting where color and life abound in the form of “bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds, warm and passionate and sun-golden.” The house may be old, but it refuses to fall down and, in the narrator’s recollection, stays up because the boards “are leaning together.” The whole place infuriates the children. The flowers “did not make sense,” offering such lively beauty among things going to ruin. Yet after many years, Lizabeth can imagine the defiant old house vividly and regrets the violent tantrum that destroyed what was, for Miss Lottie and in retrospect for Lizabeth, a small symbol of abundance in a setting devastated by scarcity.
