Mrs. Lottie's Marigolds

The details that help me understand the time and place of the story are the descriptions of Maryland during the Great Depression period such as “the brown, crumbly dust”, “the dirt roads and grassless yards”. Maybelle remembers “a brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust - Mrs. Lottie’s marigolds”. This quote might be important to the theme stating that even though there are hard times that you may be going through, there are always positive things coming from it (marigolds).

2. Several details in lines 15-26 relate to the author’s message, for instance, “marigolds flash across my mind, and a strange nostalgia comes with it and remains long after the picture has faded”, “Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled …show more content…
Joey and his friends want to go to Mrs Lottie’s house to purposely annoy her. It says in line 104,”...for annoying Miss Lottie was always fun.” Their feelings might move the story forward because this is one of the decisions where it is very suspenseful and no one knows what's going to happen. Two different things could happen between the two choices in the story.

5. I believe that the children like to play around with Mrs Lottie's emotions because they find it entertaining to watch her reactions.“The idea caught on at once, for annoying Miss Lottie was always fun”, this shows how the children enjoy toying with Mrs Lottie's emotions.

6. The children's motivation to annoy Mrs Lottie was out of fear of Mrs Lottie herself. Since they were afraid of her it was always an adrenaline rush when the woman would run out screaming, which is why they enjoyed it so much. They thought it was so amusing to see everything in action where Mrs Lottie is flailing and screaming at her son to scare them away but he never can.

7. The narrator thought that Mrs. Lottie's marigolds were the strangest thing.”Certainly they did not fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of her yard”, this quote provides details to describe how the narrator feels about Mrs. Lottie's …show more content…
There are a couple themes to this story but one of them is that once you become an adult you see things in a more mature way and a whole new perspective. “That violent, crazy act was the last act of childhood. For as I gazed at the immobile face with the sad, weary eyes, I gazed upon a kind of reality that is hidden to childhood. 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.” This quote supports the theme because it shows Lizabeth’s change of perspective towards Mrs Lottie. Another theme is that there is always something positive in negative times and this quote supports this theme as well. It says that Mrs Lottie “dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness and sterility”, revealing that Mrs Lottie wanted to be the good in the bad environment of the

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