Texas outline filled with wildflowers on ribs

She drew the panhandle first, then the long slant of the Gulf edge, working from memory and from the bluebonnets her brother used to pick for her along the ditch banks. Bluebonnets went in the north-west, where the land rose and the wind bit hardest. Indian paintbrush she put on the western reach, red as a struck match, spilling down into the hills. The pink blooms she gave to the upper right, where the prairie rolled toward the Red River, and they seemed to lift off the paper as the brush dried. The rose she saved for the bottom bend near the coast, and she painted it fat and orange, the colour of a late sun through dust.

Mr Haskell from the county came in June to inspect the wall. He stood in front of it for a long time with his hat in his hands, then asked whether the flowers could be taken down before the school board met. Ada said she would consider it. That night she mixed a yellow for a small bloom at the foot of the Gulf, because he had mentioned his wife grew up in Galveston and missed the sea-thrift there. When the children came in the next morning, they pressed their palms to the wall the way children do, and the wet paint came away on their hands, orange and blue and red, and nobody could say for certain which of them had been there first.