Down the Grapevine
$12.82 April mortgage payment ~ 5¢ for 1 pkt. flower seeds, mixed ~ 22¢ for 1-1/2 lb. ground round
Coming down the Grapevine in the hiccoughing Plymouth into the San Joaquin Valley, they'd see the hills rolling in lupines, spread by a blue wind, and the desert floored with orange California poppies.
In the back yard of their new house, in the new tract down the street from brand-new Douglas Aircraft, he mixed cement for a garden path. But she said Wait, curve it a little, around the forget-me-nots, like so. And that's the way the path was for us, even after she was gone.
She wrote no poems, left no journals for a daughter to know her by, except a ledger of household accounts and a notebook of shorthand exercises from Delano High School.
But when she lay in the white bed, hair dark against the white pillow, and my father who never went to church except to get married kneeling beside, she said Oh Bobby, you're not really losing me. I'll be the mountain wildflowers, and in the valley, when it's all poppies, that's where I'll be.