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The Marigolds Reflection

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The story, "Marigolds", has a beautiful message within the sad story that some may see it as. But if you look beyond the fact that it takes place in a barren town of poverty, you can see the beauty within the Marigolds, which represent much more than one may assume. When I read this story, I looked at it in a couple different ways and found a few different ways that the theme could be understood, still adding up to one theme. I also found a couple different ways that the marigolds could be represented. For example, there is beauty everywhere, everyone must learn to grow up, and one cannot have compassion and innocence. This goes into the one theme of, when someone grows up, they learn to look into things deeper and see the beauty …show more content…

This one is in fact not about the marigolds, but about growing up. Lizabeth and her friends enjoyed wrecking Miss Lottie's flowers because they thought it was fun and comical to see the look on her face when she was mad at them. Lizabeth started to think that maybe doing so was silly and childish, but tried to convince herself that it was all in good fun. When her parents got into a big fight over their lack of money, it really sparked something in Lizabeth. She started to think deeply about her situation and how poor she and her family were. This was simply a harsh reminder of the happiness that Miss Lottie had learned to find, even in the toughest of conditions. This happiness was the marigolds that Miss Lottie had planted in her yard. Lizabeth lashed out on the only thing left in her life that was not demolished and blighted. This happened in a different story as well. In, “The Fault in our Stars”, the blind guy was mad that his girlfriend broke up with him so he started smashing Gus's trophies to get his anger out. Everyone in the real world knows that bottling up anger inside of you can stress you out even more than if you were to break something unintentionally. Anyways, when she saw Miss Lottie's reaction to her destroyed flowers, Lizabeth realized that her impatience with the kids destroying her flowers was not because her flowers were ruined. It was rather that the kids were picking on her. Miss Lottie wasn't mad at Lizabeth for stomping on her flowers, just sad that her little sliver of happiness was gone. This made Lizabeth see that it was very childish to do what she had done. She needed to grow up and learn to deal with her problems in an adult and sophisticated way. Lines 356-358 are a perfect example of the way Lizabeth saw Miss Lottie's sadness. “The witch was no longer a witch but only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness

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