There was a little girl named Betty who loved flowers.
She would gather seeds and root cuttings and plant them everywhere there was an empty spot.
She lived at the edge of a great dark woods in an old Victorian two story house with an attic full of trunks and wardrobes and a basement that had an old wringer washer and a big coal bin for the furnace. The house was owned by her Aunts who were the only family that she had left after "The Great Accident," of which they never spoke.
Betty loved to go to the library and look at the botanical books and garden manuals and would beg her Aunts to send away for every seed and rose catalog available.
She would only draw flowers in Art class.
Or paint them.
Or collage them from bits of colored papers torn with fingers itching to grow something.
Sometimes, she would take the long road home just so she could look at all the flowers her neighbors had blooming in their yards.
As she grew older and her flower gardens became larger, they soon went all the way around her house, which was old and in need of a new coat of paint.
Betty would have helped her Aunts fix it up, but they were poor and quite uninterested in spending good money on something that only the neighbors would enjoy.
Or so they said.
I think it was because they loved the way the paint looked as it aged and crackled and peeled back to expose the lovely cedar wood from which the house had been built.
It reminded them of when the house was first begun and all the handsome carpenter's who had felled the trees in the nearby woods and how wonderful it smelled as their saws worked their way through giant logs leaving piles of sawdust all around.
The Aunts had gathered some of that sawdust and used it to stuff pincushions and rag dolls that they made and sold on Saturdays at their stand down by the road.
They had honeybees and sold jars filled with the honey they collected.
There was often sachets of lavender and pillows filled with rose petals and all sorts of things sewn and embroidered by the Aunts.
The shoppers would see who could get there the earliest because you never knew what you might find at the Aunts little stand.
They said that there was a little bit of magic stitched in them and if you happened to tear open a doll by accident ( like that old hound dog Ajax did when he ran and grabbed one off the market stand table one day!) you might just find bits of mica and tiny poems and good luck wishes written in tiny perfect penmanship on old pieces of parchment. Or so I heard from the old man that owns that Ajax dog!
At first the line was just one or two ladies with their empty market baskets and fat purses and then as word spread through the county it was 20 or 30 ladies all standing around the stand waiting for them to appear in their old beat up station wagon.
Betty loved to hop out and run through the crowd with the vintage linens piled high in her arms till she got to the stand and quickly cleared the dried leaves and spread the cloths out nice, for the Aunts to display their goods.
As the years past and Betty learned how to sew and stitch samplers of beautiful embroidery stitches, she started making things to sell at the market stand herself.
Betty loved to wear aprons and giant floppy hats when she gardened and was often complimented by the ladies when she went to town for supplies.
Betty would wait patiently for the new shipments of cloth to arrive at the mercantile and would look at each bolt of cloth with such yearning that the shop keeper's wife started giving her the scraps and ends of the bolts just to see her face light up with love and gratitude.
She had never had any children of her own and loved to encourage all the young women to appreciate cloth and thread and the potential that was in them to become something wonderful.
Betty would ask her politely to order fabrics with flowers.
Roses, daisies, pansies, anything she could get!
The shop keeper's wife did and soon Betty had enough fabric to start making quilts and aprons and hats and earn more money to buy more fabric and she was so happy.
She would cover the aprons with flowers and images cut from fabric and use scraps of linen and old tea towels.
The garden hats were the best because all the women wanted one!
She could sell all she could sew!
What a delightful way to make a dollar!
She loved to imagine all the plants it would buy and rose bushes and maybe some day she would be able to hire a painter to come pretty up the old house to its former splendor.
***
I am sharing this story with you because I was lucky enough to be first in line one Saturday morning and I filled my basket with honey, fresh baked blackberry scones, a few pincushions, an armful of fresh cut flowers wrapped in brown paper and a gorgeous apron made by Botanical Betty.
Would you like to see it?
You would?
well....maybe tomorrow when I can take it out in the sunshine and get a good picture.
For now, you'll just have to know that it is lovely and has roses and embroidery and bits of this and that sewn to it!
Almost like a trip back in time, to a simpler age when things were sweet and charming.
Toodle loo for now, I must get back to work.
I just thought you'd like a little story since I have been so busy this week and dreadful neglectful on the Blog.
I love you, dearies!
Calamity Kim
original story by me,
2008,
not to be copied or used without permission from me
or there will be dire calamities to you and yours!
believe it!
