Lizabeth says the children hated the flowers because "They interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place; they were too beautiful; they said too much that we could not understand." What do the marigolds stand for?

The narrator remembers Miss Lottie's marigolds as "a brilliant splash of sunny yellow" in her hometown. What does she say that yellow stood out against?

Miss Lottie spends every summer down on her creaky knees weeding and cultivating the marigolds while her house crumbles. What does the narrator finally say the flowers held for her?

Standing over the wrecked garden, Miss Lottie shows no rage, "now that the garden was destroyed and there was nothing any longer to be protected." What had the marigolds been to her?

The story's last line is "And I too have planted marigolds." What does the adult narrator mean she has done?

Lizabeth tears up the marigolds at half-dawn, hours after hearing her father sob in the dark. What cause does the story give for the act?

Joey commands "Y'all git some stones," and everyone but Lizabeth starts gathering pebbles. What moves her to take part?

Lizabeth pinches and slaps Joey awake at 4 A.M. and tells him only "Just come on." Why does she really want him up?

Of her father's weeping Lizabeth says, "I had never heard a man cry before. I did not know men ever cried." What does that night do to how she sees her family?

Lizabeth runs out of the bushes straight at Miss Lottie, chanting "Old witch, fell in a ditch, picked up a penny and thought she was rich!" What does the narrator say drove her out?

In the ruined garden the narrator says, "This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence." What does she mean?

"M-miss Lottie!" the narrator cries, "and that was the moment when childhood faded and womanhood began." Which moment is she naming?

"Innocence involves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface." By that definition, how had Lizabeth been seeing Miss Lottie until that morning?

The narrator says the witch "was no longer a witch but only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness and sterility." What has changed at that point?

"Of course I could not express the things that I knew about Miss Lottie as I stood there awkward and ashamed. The years have put words to the things I knew in that moment." What is the narrator claiming?

An adult Lizabeth tells the story of her fourteenth summer looking back on it. What does that retrospective frame let the story do?

In the first paragraph the narrator says memory "does not present things as they are, but rather as they feel." What does putting that admission at the start do?

Just after the stone-throwing, the narrator breaks off to wonder whether the children were more aware of the bars of their cage than she had thought. What does that interruption add?

Early in the story the narrator says the emotions of adolescence feel "as real as the potted geranium before me now." What does that detail establish?

The final paragraph reports that Miss Lottie died long ago and that, despite Lizabeth's wild contrition, she never planted marigolds again. What makes the story able to tell us this?