Flight by john steinbeck pdf print
“Why, sure, that’s what I came to tell you. “Henry, who were those men you were talking to?” “Well, it sure works with flowers,” he said.
Flight by john steinbeck pdf print how to#
She said it was having planters’ hands that knew how to do it.” She could stick anything in the ground and make it grow. I wish you’d work out in the orchard and raise some apples that big.” “Some of those yellow chrysanthemums you had this year were ten inches across. You’ve got a gift with things,” Henry observed. They’ll be strong this coming year.” In her tone and on her face there was a little smugness. “You’ve got a strong new crop coming.”Įlisa straightened her back and pulled on the gardening glove again. He had come near quietly, and he leaned over the wire fence that protected her flower garden from cattle and dogs and chickens. Her terrier fingers destroyed such pests before they could get started.Įlisa started at the sound of her husband’s voice. No aphids were there, no sowbugs or snails or cutworms. She spread the leaves and looked down among the close-growing stems. She took off a glove and put her strong fingers down into the forest of new green chrysanthemum sprouts that were growing around the old roots. The strangers were getting into their Ford coupe. It was a hard-swept looking little house, with hard-polished windows, and a clean mud-mat on the front steps.Įlisa cast another glance toward the tractor shed. Behind her stood the neat white farm house with red geraniums close-banked around it as high as the windows. She brushed a cloud of hair out of her eyes with the back of her glove, and left a smudge of earth on her cheek in doing it. The chrysanthemum stems seemed too small and easy for her energy. Her face was eager and mature and handsome even her work with the scissors was over-eager, over-powerful. She looked down toward the men by the tractor shed now and then. She was cutting down the old year’s chrysanthemum stalks with a pair of short and powerful scissors. She wore heavy leather gloves to protect her hands while she worked. Her figure looked blocked and heavy in her gardening costume, a man’s black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clod-hopper shoes, a figured print dress almost completely covered by a big corduroy apron with four big pockets to hold the snips, the trowel and scratcher, the seeds and the knife she worked with. Her face was lean and strong and her eyes were as clear as water. They smoked cigarettes and studied the machine as they talked.Įlisa watched them for a moment and then went back to her work. The three of them stood by the tractor shed, each man with one foot on the side of the little Fordson. The cattle on the higher slopes were becoming shaggy and rough-coated.Įlisa Allen, working in her flower garden, looked down across the yard and saw Henry, her husband, talking to two men in business suits. A light wind blew up from the southwest so that the farmers were mildly hopeful of a good rain before long but fog and rain did not go together.Īcross the river, on Henry Allen’s foothill ranch there was little work to be done, for the hay was cut and stored and the orchards were plowed up to receive the rain deeply when it should come. It was a time of quiet and of waiting. The air was cold and tender. The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves. On the foothill ranches across the Salinas River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but there was no sunshine in the valley now in December. On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black earth shining like metal where the shares had cut. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot. The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. The Chrysanthemums ~ A Classic American Short Story by John Steinbeck (1902-1968)