Of Flies, Lovers' Letters, French Vanity, and Petted Plants

by Punzie the Platypus

Laurie comes home from touring a college with his grandfather to see his favorite March sisters. They're all each a little busy between two tasks at the moment to pay him the attention he wants: Meg's writing and sewing or neither, Jo's fully armored to defend the house from an invasion, Beth's a tender gardener, and Amy's an experimental procrastinator.

Soli Deo gloria

DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own Little Women. I just finished reading through it again and can once again heartily say that it is one of my favorite books of all time. I love each and every one of these darling characters. Also, I borrowed a bit of a story from Grandma's Attic. See if you can catch the reference!

When Laurie opened the side gate and heard the excited, if somewhat agitated, shouts of an almost breathless Jo, he knew he was in for a jolly good, heartening afternoon.

He needed some cheering up, as his childhood had come to a long-coming, yet grinding close. All the education best set for a growing, curious lad had been fed into him as much as his boyish brain could hold by Brooke, who'd possessed an exorbitant dose of patience with his young charge. Brooke had closed the back cover of a thick Plato book one day and said calmly, with just a touch of sadness in his tone, "Well, young Laurie, that is the last of it. There is no more I can teach you."

The happy boyhood days of skipping between lessons in the big study to the hominess of the five women with welcome hearts, kind voices, and open arms were slowly but inevitably grinding to a halt. Laurie mourned the death of his childhood education as he grimly met with the birth of his manly education. He and his grandfather had been gone a week visiting the old man's alma mater. Laurie smiled pleasingly and shook hands heartily with all Mr. Laurence's old friends, colleagues, and professors. While Mr. Laurence talked animatedly of the campus as they strolled about and around the ancient buildings on tour, Laurie masterfully and wisely hid his expression of horrified resignation from the old man. He saw the confines of the buildings and the study halls and met them as grimly as he would the actual Grim Reaper: with a sigh, but, recognizing the inevitability of the situation, nodded, stuck his large white hands into his pockets, and sallied forth at a solid, slow pace.

Being gone a week facing a future full of studying and boredom and confines of the academical nature left him feeling like a frustrated untamed pony, longing to enjoy the freedom young foals unwittingly took for granted. As soon as he could get away from the servants handling their baggage and settling his grandfather back into the sweet home comforts he drew such sound enjoyment from, the untamed boy hurried into the chaotic yet perfectly imperfect kingdom thriving just next door.

As he and the Marches had grown warm in acquaintance to the point where Mrs. March considered him a son, he didn't knock so much as just slip in undetected. He peered around a corner into the sitting room which poured into the kitchen. His eyes ate up this fun opposite of an idyllic picture: as follows:

In order from calmest to the most hectic one must of course start with placid Beth. She, like her sisters, was constantly being drawn forth between two different tasks, as if feeling too guilty over one to leave it for long, but then turning back to the other with the same feeling. Beth's pale skin and trembling fingers looked much better as she worked in the golden sunlight pouring in from the window. Along this particular window's sill, brushing against the edges of plain but well-embroidered, neat little curtains, were several small orange clay pots. These were homemade little things, if the uneven walls, lumpy bottoms, and noticeable fingerprint indents could be trusted to tell the truth.

At the beginning of spring tiny little seeds containing little hopes and dreams were tucked into beds of black dirt that brotherly Jo had heroically hacked up from the half-frozen ground for her small sister's sake. Now they'd blossomed, and it being at the end of June, showed off their pretty natural thrills and dress ruffles to their tender caregiver. Beth was torn between being the tender midwife to their bloom and also the coroner of their death; several of these precious petted flowers had opened up weeks ago, and already in that time they'd enjoyed the prettiness of maidenhood, the crawl of womanhood, and the slow descent of old age. Their edges furled in brown, their color lost its brightness, and they sunk down under the weight of their age, slowly creeping back towards the ground from which they'd sprung. Beth's two tasks, in caring for her flowers at every stage of their lives, were opposite in nature yet each equally as important as the other. She had a little water pail, metal, that she filled with water from the well along with a dipper or two of boiling water to create something quite lukewarm and nice as bathwater. This she bathed her wee blossoms in, humming to herself the while. The little blossoms' heads rose, as if strengthened by the tending of their little mistress. They straightened up, now strong and sure, breathing in the nurturing and thanking Beth all at once.

The second task that she kept falling back to was taking up the aged flowers and delivering them tenderly to their last state of rest. If they'd been left to the care of Jo, she, without any sense of sentimentality, would've hurdle the poor souls unceremoniously into the sloppy pile of compost sitting next to their little garden plots outside. Beth, however, regarded them with respect and treated them as gently as any little adopted doll she had. She laid them carefully between soft old rags in the openness of a heavy book, arranging them just so. She tucked them into their beds and laid the other cover of the book atop it as soberly as anyone closing a coffin.

This afternoon she bobbed between feeding the youth and delivering the corpses to a soft resting place. Occasionally she'd fetch more water; oftener than anyone wanted to admit, she'd stop and rest in a chair, and look out over her little flowers, and at the view from their front window. Something soft and longing in her quiet gaze made one's heart stumble, startled at the strongness of it. Pain like this was often, if never, seen on such a young face.

Next calmest was Amy; to a common onlooker she seemed quite at ease at the tasks she performed; to herself, she held the most stressful of self-inflicted anxiety within her. French homework, full of long words, exact pronouncations, and correct spellings as a must, greatly excited her and also greatly vexed her to the uttermost. She fancied herself an almost master at these two former, while giving the third the leniency of not being her strong suit; but today was such a struggle overcoming all three hurdles, that she could hardly keep her focus on it for if she did, she found her feet stuck fast as in the mud of a ditch. Therefore, to her young mind, it was easier to give herself to the beauty of art rather than the mentally-challenging call of mind-forming.

She engaged in creating herself such a deliciously horrible vain concoction of wax, honey, and some of Beth's lavender sprigs. She'd found the recipe for this moisturizing cream in one of her old classmate's magazines (as they liked to keep her up-to-date on all the latest styles, fancies, and moments in fashion); though her skin was unusually lovely and one of her better features, she thought that since 'clothespins on my nose doesn't do much, and as my chin has an unchangeable, inevatable fate, I can only make the best of my best features, in efforts to outshine my lesser ones'. Thus her French homework sat on Marmee's workbench, gathering dust and several sidewise glances from the worried eyes of this little miss as she stirred at her broken cream.

Next was a fretful Meg. Her maternal instinct told her to put a loving hand on Amy and steer her in the productive direction. Then her lover's side threw her eyes at the long, long letter written in her own John's hand sitting next to that dreaded French homework. He'd been at the war only two months, yet she missed him with a passion to be rivaled by any of Shakespeare's lovers. Every week Beth would come in gently with his letter extended out on her hand for the loved sister; this sister would snatch it up and disappear. No one, from Jo in her garret to Beth in her corner, knew where she'd gone. But she would always turn up hours later, her face obviously having gone through a series of convultions and revolutions, as if she gave in to crying and then decided to cheer through it, but then next went to being selfish for her John alone, confound the country! They had plenty of young men! Next to reproach for her selfishness, then a vow to be strong and womanly, next to sigh and long for her future wedded life and home and her John. She would tell all the patiently listening ears of that little saluation always written at the last that John would address to them. That was all that she would say to them of the contents of the letters. Marmee would perhaps get bits and pieces, of the important parts, in private consultation. Jo never would be told, for she ridiculed the romance he wrote with, and the sentimentality instead of ink.

This lover's side took a fork in the road to the practical work that sat in her lap to remind her of firm reality. It was a handtowel she'd set herself to seam and stitch that afternoon; it was for her future house, and thus had a sort of magic to it, as if she worked at it, she was working closer and closer to that little house. It lay, tousled and half-neglected, on her lap as her hand drifted to the two paragraphs she wanted to add long, long lines to on a reply to her John, and her eyes to her especial blonde sister.

Her eyes also fell to the last and most excited sister, this sister that Laurie couldn't help but be drawn to first. His eyes smiled as hard as his face as he watched this dancing girl.

Jo, it seemed, had been attacked by a severe domestic fit. Her mother gone to work on bandages, her father, still recovering from his winter's illness, lost in his study, she threw herself into a cleaning fit. Perhaps this had to do with the unsatisfactory results of some papers that wouldn't be written as she thought they ought. Perhaps she'd scoffed at the lazy heat that'd suppressed any sort of energetic outburst for the past month. Perhaps she wanted a quick result of an afternoon's work. Perhaps she wanted to shoulder the burden of Hannah and her mother and be 'the man of the family' again. One couldn't ask her, as she could barely speak from absolute frustration at that moment. She'd been possessed with a passionate desire to snap up several tomatoes from the fresh aromatic garden sitting behind the house and pickle them. Their mother being out since that morning, the only objecter was practical Meg, who thought it 'an awful activity in this terrible heat, Jo; take a dose of sense and a glass of water and sit down and you will see, dear'. Jo, to oblige her sister, did all these things, sat a moment or two, and then jumped up and declared, "Where is the basket? I need something to carry the tomatoes in; I'm tempted to carry them all in my arms like puppies, but, for the sake of my dress and Meg's sanity regarding it, I shall be a little civil."

Meg sighed, but was glad that it was a basket as opposed to a big hat being the nest for the tomatoes. Beth found the basket full of old hats and scarves in the attic next to their stage, and Amy watched all this process with an especial eye. Her feelings concerning this food were mixed: she loved sweets, and thought tomatoes something good to be pickled, but her experience regarding the pickled limes and her humiliation at school made her wrinkle her nose at the notion of these sweet-and-sour things. She glanced up now and again to see Jo amongst the hot sticky leaves of tomato plants and trying dirt in the garden, then next lugging the heavy basket into the kitchen; after, drawn by the sharp scent of peppercorns and vinegar, to see her sister poking over the pots of simmering brew like a firm-lipped nanny over a many crib of babies.

Jo, unaware of her sister's glances, noticed another onlooker. Or rather, several; all detestable, and disgusting, and irritating in every sense of the word. For Jo, in her watch over her tomatoes from any tumbles and trips her long legs would take her in her bullish way, had forgotten to close the back door behind her. Before the wind had pulled it back to the latch in time for Laurie's entrance into the kingdom, several new residents flew in with glee, as if having waited precisely for this exact opportunity all their short lives. Buzzing and flying with tiny grey wings, flies popped up in the young housekeeper's vision, distracting her from the niceness of her brew and the seeds sparkling from her board's tomato massacre.

Meg looked up from her absorbing John and wrinkled her nose unprettily. "What is that awful noise?"

Beth stopped her steady little stream of tumbling water to listen. Jo's eyes sharpened on the villain as Amy shrieked. Her clay bowl of honey full of specks of hardened white wax and stubby pieces of shrubbery fell in a fantastic clatter to the floor as she sought out the comfort of Meg's knee in horror.

"Amy, whatever happened?" for Meg couldn't've seen the horror that Amy's childish eyes had witnessed.

"A-a fly went into my ointment!" was the stricken reply mined away from the choked throat.

Jo, however, set her lips and went to work. She wouldn't let these disease-carrying bugs cover her kitchen and rush about her house and act as if they lived here! Not under her command would Marmee come home to find an inset colony roaming at free-range within her house, so clean and nice, despite being shabby and poor. "They must be got out," Jo said calmly. This calmness didn't deceive Meg, who looked up from a shaken Amy to say, "Jo, what do you mean to do?"

Jo ignored her briefly as she ransacked Hannah's neat closet and finally turned up amongst the jumble of buckets, sacks, and packages, a well-worn, neat little straw broom. Armed with this worthy sword, clothed in the battle armor of a stained apron and old burnt work gloves, her helmet her shapely short mop to match her broom, and this last: determination brightly shining out of her eyes, made Meg's answer. "I brought them in and I don't see why anyone else but me should kindly show them the way out. They're attracted by the scent of the tomatoes, though one would've hoped the vinegar would've been a ward against them. As it isn't, their removal falls to my guilty shoulders, so no one else lift a finger or move until I rid us of them."

Her vim and vigor against these enemies saw no equal on the battlefield, and it was this vicious scene of girl against nature's pest that young Laurie walked in to see.

Jo almost punched a hole in the wall with the blunt end of her broom when she saw him. "My boy's back!" she shouted, her face alight with gladness. This was quickly removed from her face as she saw the fly trying to sneak away just behind Laurie's curls. She ran after it, yelling, "Dodge, Laurie, quick! I can't be stopped!"

Laurie flipped around the corner and watched her unmercifully introduce the fly to her fistful of straw. He grinned as she set the broom down, tucked a tiny flyaway lock of hair back behind her ear, and then turned to Laurie with a grin on her face. "My boy! How do you find college?"

Laurie welcomed her immediate embrace. "I find it irksome and confining, and unlike home in every aspect. I foresee several years of self-denial ahead, and as you know your Teddy too well, you know how hard that will be to do."

"I do know my Teddy well, and I know that in his heart of hearts, he will do what it takes to please the people who love and respect and adore him, for he longs to be as good as they believe him to truly be," Jo tsked comfortingly.

Laurie sighed, a little of his merriment gained upon seeing such a fun scene upon his return home gone as he said, a little accusingly, "Pity me, poor Jo, and save your lectures for later. I'm home from a week of pretending that I am prepared for the task of sacrificing three or four years of my life for my grandfather's sake, and beg to be petted."

"You make yourself sound of a true martyr, Teddy mine. Believe me, your life is really quite easy and nice as opposed to others. Still, your moment will be given to you. I shall pet you soothingly into quite a happy state of mind, but only after I've rid the house of a detestable legion of flies that've taken to plaguing me. You'll understand. Go beg kisses from the other girls while I busy myself," Jo said, arming herself at length once more.

"I shan't be as petted as I should from you, for Amy would only ask about the trip, Beth say nothing but smile, and Meg advise," Laurie protested.

"And my lecturing is different from Meg's advising?" Jo asked, amused.

"They're as different as you and she," Laurie replied sincerely.

"I see. Well, it's not as if I'm sending you into a dirty dungeon. Bear up well under the care of these three who love you, and I shall be back presently if only you'd let me be," Jo said calmly. She then took leave of Laurie before he could rein her back in with his wheedling words and soft brown eyes that made one laugh and indeed have the intended sympathy on the poor boy.

Meg cast her eyes away from Jo after her feeble protests fell unheeded from her lips as the warrior magpie went viciously after the enemy knights in dull armor. She instead took to her pen and ink, to pour heart and soul out to her lover over the everyday medium of thin school paper and low ink. This task proved itself a hard one as she kept glancing over at the watchful eyes of the little boy silently begging for some love and affection. How could she write such words of love when this mischievous boy ate at her, as if baiting her?

"Go away, Laurie. I'm busy," she said.

"I'm lost of my Jo, so I must have Miss Meg. You're not a snobbish old wife yet, so do be nice to me while you can," he said. He played at a leaf on one of Beth's drying flowers and said, "How's old Brooke?"

"How's your grandfather?" Meg asked briskly. Her nimble fingers decided on the towel next, as she could keep her eyes focused on that task, for it didn't speak of matters of the heart but of practicality and helpful use at home.

"Glad to be home and away from traveling. The carriage was the best bit of the entire trip, though. I saw such landscapes as made me want to leap out the door and run for miles on end in the fresh air," Laurie said excitedly.

"Have you come to complain about your trip or to engage in good, wholesome conversation?" Meg asked coolly.

"I'll take the latter if the former doesn't present itself as a viable option," Laurie tossed the ball back to her. If she were Jo, she'd throw back the ball with a wind-up of her arm and a toss as good as any seasoned sportsman. As this was Meg, she instead gave him an eyeful and let the ball slide along the grass back to him. She became quite absorbed in her sewing, for her little world couldn't be penetrated by his poking and teasing.

Laurie, finding her unhelpful at the moment, turned next to Amy. "What's this?" he said, finding the unappetizing mess of cosmetics and eatables settled into a widespread puddle upon Marmee's clean floor.

"A fly is in it, dead, floating, and I can't use it. It's a perfect waste and I don't see why it had to come and spoil it by drowning in it!" Amy sighed.

Laurie inspected the mess with an unusually inspective eye as Jo pointed her weapon at Amy and demanded her to clean up this mess, as her own silliness caused it and its disposal should fall to no one's responsibility except the culprit's. "And seeing as the fly cannot clean up his own death, that duty falls to you, Amy," was the unsympathetic sister; to emphasize her stance on this matter, she successfully whacked five times at three flies and succeeded in stopping short two of them. She picked them up between her fingertips, causing Amy to nearly gag, as she threw them into a little pile of rotting tomato vines she'd created in a bucket.

"Have you no good breeding?! At the very least, use a rag instead of your own fingers! The thought! Oh!" Amy could've fainted dead away if Laurie hadn't looked up and said, "I think that whatever this is is hardening to the floor. Amy, was this by chance another attempt at art, or just a spilled bucket of glue?"

"I think it another special kind of plaster meant for her face as opposed to her foot this time," Jo said wickedly as she skipped around to the dishwashing tub and followed in the steps of her sister in the art of drowning flies.

That sent the venerable Amy to her feet, hands in fists, as she passed by Laurie and began to heat up a pot of hot water next to the fiercely bubbling forgotten pots, and said in a passion to her heartless older sister, "You're a trial on one's nerves!"

"You could receive the same compliment," the witty writer said wryily as she casually sent another fly to its death. She gazed about her as Amy heaved a bucket away with unusual color in her cheeks; all in all, Jo had made a war zone with at least a dozen casualities; however, somehow their army had grown trifold. Outnumbered, she summed up her second wind and went with vivacious savagery against the oncoming lines.

Laurie found himself next to Beth as she patiently watered, patted, and talked to her little plants. He watched all the little activities about him with a happiness almost entirely overshadowed by an underlying sadness. There were two and more years until young Meg's wedding, yet this moment of her working on her little household goods and talking to her lover as heart to heart in her parents' home would be gone in a moment. Amy having time to worry about her little looks and vanities would be gone as she grew into a beautiful woman who never needed that ointment anyway. Little Beth. . . Laurie looked up at her with admiring eyes. She didn't blush and look away but met his eyes, smiled, and then continued her soft humming as she finished her loving administrations and picked the last of her fading flowers to put safely to bed.

Beth wouldn't be there forever; she, like that afternoon, would only last a moment.

Finally he looked at his fiesty girl, throwing her broom up in her hand in victory as she shrieked and almost poked a new hole into their upstairs bedroom. She was streaked with dirt and dust; tomato skins decorated her apron, her curly hair frizzled like Meg's when she went to a ball, and the sickly smell of burning tomatoes and unrelenting vinegar pemeated the air like a severe perfume. His Jo—how he wished she would remain like this, with him, forever. The two of them jolly good friends, always laughing, scheming, talking, bantering, lecturing, pranking, teasing, loving and caring for each other every long day, take what they may, together. They were brother and sister in every deepest, most best meaning of the word.

Well, maybe he wouldn't have he and Jo remain the same forever. He would love her always to be sharp and blunt, throwing her shoulders up and petting his hair and calling him 'Teddy' and 'our boy'. But perhaps this with a little star in her eyes as would be seen in a lover's.

All this scene before him made him sigh and quiet as Jo fell to whisking her pots off the fire, saving them somehow, putting off the broom, and bottling her pickles prettily. By the time the lumpy pickles were sealed away in boiled mason jars and set to cool in a hurricane-struck kitchen brought on by a well-meaning maid called Jo, the determined housekeeper had fallen into a chair with a handkerchief on her face and her breath let out heavily amongst the now calmer sisters. Meg had finished her letter for the time being and now focused solely on her towel and sisters and friend. Beth's attentions to her plants now completed, she sat darning a sock of Father's. Amy, having cleaned the mess with Laurie's help, sat prim and proper with straight back at Meg's knee, looking dutifully over her homework and rolling syllables under her tongue with as much affected accent as she thought proper.

"Golly, what a lot of work! Marmee and Hannah do make it look so easy! That smell, and those flies! Awful, stupid things! But all dead, now, I hope," Jo complained openly.

"Tut tut tut, save your tongue from words of complaint, or else Preacher Meg will make you regret it," Laurie teased.

Meg turned a nose away from the children. Jo said, "Oh, come now, Laurie, don't start. I'm hot and tired and bothered and I won't have you saucing mr, you little boy. Tell us now of your trip. Do you like the campus?"

"Well enough."

"How about the professors? Charming, knowledgeable, stiff-necked and old?"

"Well enough."

"How's your grandfather liking the university, after being gone away from it so long?" Amy inquired in a polite tone of voice.

"Well enough," said the lazy boy from his lounging spot.

Jo threw her horsehair pillow at him, to a great shout of annoyed protest. "That is what you earn when you can't keep conversation like a civilized gentleman," Jo informed him.

"You sound like Meg and Amy all in one, my Jo," Teddy said admonishingly.

Amy looked as if she wondered if to take offense to this as Meg said, "Then she has gone and grown up a bit, despite your best attempts at stopping it, Laurie."

"I won't have that said about me. I'm neither Meg nor Amy, and am glad, or else I wouldn't be me but them, and I think they'd say the same," Jo said gaily, fanning herself with a book from the stack on the workbench.

Laurie grinned. "Miss Meg shall be Mrs. Brooke in a matter of minutes, the finest queen to rule a house besides our own dear Queen Mother. Miss Amy will grown into the classiest little woman of our acquaintance, sweet and polite to everyone she comes to entertain, and shall be a pride to us all. Beth will be the finest of all women, for no one under her affection could ever lack for any good human thing."

Amy smiled, Meg was appeased, and Beth blushed. And Jo, leaning forward, bright with sweat in the sunlight pouring in from the window, said, "And what, pray tell, darling Teddy, shall become of your tomboy?"

Laurie looked at Jo for a moment, studying her. This afternoon, this moment, would not last long. It would be gone in a flash, lost along the years that would come rushing and pulling them along. He hoped his hopes about the girls would be true; he held them to be as good as they thought him and always hoped him to be; he looked at Jo and her sisters and hoped them all to stay like this moment despite the whirlwind of years of the world ahead of them. "Jo March shall be the most loved of us all, for she tries the hardest, and shall win out in the end. I can only hope to be able to aspire to what she already aspires to be."

This was a satisfactory answer to all, and Laurie was indeed no longer lectured, but graciously petted, praised, and soothed by his four favorite little women.

Thanks for reading! Review?