The Tall Grass

“There’s no clover left,” said Harper. “The frost got it. I checked.”

Katie didn’t argue. Katie almost never argues. She tucked her long black braid down the back of her collar, the way she always does before she goes somewhere worth going, and slipped off into the meadow to see for herself.

By the middle of the meadow the grass had closed over her head, and she could not see the others at all, and she could not have been happier.

That is the good part of being the smallest. The big girls walk through the meadow. Katie goes into it. In October the grass stands tall and gone-to-seed, the colour of weak tea, and to Katie it is a forest grown to her size — stalks for trunks, and a gold whispering ceiling far overhead.

Her braid slipped out of her collar as she went and dragged along behind her through the seed-heads, picking up burrs. Katie forgot all about it. The braid went on picking things up anyway.

She looked where the frost might have missed. Under the hedge — nothing. Along the stone wall — nothing. Then, in the low dip by the stream, where the ground stays warm longest, she found it: a whole patch of white clover, blooming away as if nobody had told it about October.

Katie sat down in the middle of it. She picked exactly enough to carry, and left the rest standing for the bees, if any bees were still about. She tucked one flower behind her ear. Then she sat a while longer with her hands in her lap, small and quiet, in a meadow tall and gold and entirely hers.

The cold came up off the stream and told her it was time. She climbed the slope on hands and knees where the leaves made it slippery, and came out at the top of the meadow with grass in her braid and clover in her fist.

Harper was waiting by the oak, hands on hips, all ready to be cross. Then she saw what Katie was carrying, and wasn’t.

“You said there wasn’t any,” said Katie, mild as milk, and handed her a flower.

At home, on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, she stood on her toes — and could only barely reach — and laid the clover in the row of kept things, between the acorns and the sleeping jar. The latest bloom of the whole year, saved from the cold.

Then Madeline unpicked Katie’s braid-harvest, one burr at a time: five burrs, a seed-head, and one small striped snail shell. “Katie gathered the most of anybody,” she announced, “and half of it with her hair.”

Katie was asleep before the stars were properly out, one small fist shut tight around the one flower she had kept back for herself.

Nobody knew but the moon.