Birdie had then called my parents. Mother and Daddy took me home and sat me in front of the fireplace with hot chocolate warm against my lips. I heard their voices as all children do when parents believe they can’t be heard. I deciphered their words in jigsaw puzzle pieces that I put together as I pleased.

“Weren’t you watching her?” My dad’s voice.

“Of course I was. She was right behind me, and then she was gone.” Mother was crying. “Oh, Red, she is such a wildflower.”

Months later, the frost passed and the warm earth opened, allowing flowers and grass to pass through the once frozen soil. When Mother went to the nursery to buy more bulbs, I snuck a packet of wildflower seeds into the pocket of my red sundress. I figured I would be forgiven for stealing if I was doing it for a good purpose—to make Mother happy. This packet was a secret surprise for her, one that would make her smile and laugh and look me in the eyes and say my name with warm sweetness. Surely, oh, surely, she loved wildflowers.

In the middle of a moonless night, I snuck out and scattered the seeds throughout her cultured garden. Then I waited with the expectant breath-holding pleasure of any child waiting for a birthday party or a trip to Disney World. I lay in bed at night and envisioned the seeds below the deep soil, opening and thrusting upward with green stalks and wild colors like fireworks bursting into the sky.

I was coloring in my Brady Bunch coloring book at the kitchen counter when I saw her: Mother weeding the garden. Her straw hat covered her platinum hair, and the strings dangled below her chin, flowing in the wind. Her pink-flowered gardening gloves were yanking green stems from the ground and tossing them into a wicker basket she carried in the crook of her elbow.

I dropped the crayons to the floor and ran, slipping and running out the back door. “Stop!” I screamed.

Mother looked up from the ground. “Ellie, what is it?”

Tears were warm on my face and in my mouth—I tasted them. Mother dropped her basket and the new green shoots and brown crumbling roots landed on the ground.

“The flowers. Stop,” I whispered.

“I’m picking weeds, darling. What is wrong with you?”

“Those aren’t weeds. They are me. They are wildflowers. Me.” I took a long breath in. “My wildflowers.” I pulled the crumpled packet from the pocket of my culottes and held it out to Mother. “These.”

Mother looked at the packet. “Oh no, Ellie. You planted these?”

I nodded.

“These are just ordinary wildflowers.”

“There is no ordinary. All flowers are extraordinary.” I tripped over the words I didn’t fully understand, repeating what Birdie had told me.

“I don’t understand.”