A Curtain of Green — Vocabulary
Eudora Welty
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To the neighbors gazing down from their upstairs windows it had the appearance of a sort of jungle, in which the slight, heedless form of its owner daily lost itself.†1 more

She had waited there on the porch for a time afterward, not moving at all-in a sort of recollection— as if to reach under and bring out from obliteration her protective words and to try them once again ...so as to change the whole happening.†

Within its border of hedge, high like a wall, and visible only from the upstairs windows of the neighbors, this slanting, tangled garden, more and more overabundant and confusing, must have become so familiar to Mrs. Larkin that quite possibly by now she was unable to conceive of any other place.†

She was busy with the hoe, clearing one of the last patches of uncultivated ground for some new shrubs.†

The head of Jamey, bent there below her, seemed witless, terrifying, wonderful, almost inaccessible to her, and yet in its explicit nearness meant surely for destruction, with its clustered hot woolly hair, its intricate, glistening ears, its small brown branching streams of sweat, the bowed head holding so obviously and so fatally its ridiculous dream.†

Her eyes were dull and puckered, as if from long impatience or bewilderment.†

She had waited there on the porch for a time afterward, not moving at all-in a sort of recollection— as if to reach under and bring out from obliteration her protective words and to try them once again ...so as to change the whole happening.†

He remembered all the while the oblivious crash of the windows next door being shut when the rain started.... But now, in this unseen place, it was he who stood looking at poor Mrs. Larkin.†

Such a head she could strike off, intentionally, so deeply did she know, from the effect of a man's danger and death, its cause in oblivion; and so helpless was she, too helpless to defy the workings of accident, of life and death, of unaccountability.... Life and death, she thought, gripping the heavy hoe, life and death, which now meant nothing to her but which she was compelled continually to wield with both her hands, ceaselessly asking, Was it not possible to compensate?†

Everything had stopped once again, the stillness had mesmerized the stems of the plants, and all the leaves went suddenly into thickness.†

Now the intense light like a tweezers picked out her clumsy, small figure in its old pair of men's overalls rolled up at the sleeves and trousers, separated it from the thick leaves, and made it look strange and yellow as she worked with a hoe-over-vigorous, disreputable, and heedless.†

Then he jumped nimbly to his feet and ran out of the garden.†

It might seem that the extreme fertility of her garden formed at once a preoccupation and a challenge to Mrs. Larkin.†

Just to what end Mrs. Larkin worked so strenuously in her garden, her neighbors could not see.†

He bent down and in a horrified, piteous, beseeching voice he began to call her name until she stirred.†

Now the intense light like a tweezers picked out her clumsy, small figure in its old pair of men's overalls rolled up at the sleeves and trousers, separated it from the thick leaves, and made it look strange and yellow as she worked with a hoe-over-vigorous, disreputable, and heedless.†

But memory tightened about her easily, without any prelude of warning or even despair.†

A look of docility in the Negro's back as he knelt in the plants began to infuriate her.†

Only by ceaseless activity could she cope with the rich blackness of this soil.†1 more

...without any regard for the ideas that her neighbors might elect in their club as to what constituted an appropriate vista,