What does Lizabeth in the story "Marigolds" by Eugenia Collier realize as an adult?

As an
adult, Lizabeth realizes that at fourteen, she had had an epiphany about why Miss Lottie planted
marigolds. Lizabeth explains that her innocence was lost at the very moment she discerned the
truth.

 

Innocence involves an unseeing
acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface. In that
humiliating moment I looked beyond myself and into the depths of another person. This was the
beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence.

Throughout her childhood, Miss Lottie had always been the subject
of Lizabeth's childish contempt. She shared her brother, Joey's suspicion that Miss Lottie was a
witch. Since Miss Lottie never had any visitors, and no one knew how she maintained her living,
Miss Lottie became the subject of much speculation. Chief among Lizabeth and Joey's concerns was
that Miss Lottie's marigolds looked out of place on her property:

 

They interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place; they were too
beautiful; they said too much that we could not understand; they did not make sense. There was
something in the vigor with which the old woman destroyed the weeds that intimidated
us.

The enthusiasm and energy Miss Lottie displayed towards the
tending of her marigolds unnerved the children. As she reminisces about Miss Lottie, Lizabeth
also comes to realize that her perverse contempt towards the old woman had been the product of
her own childish, myopic view of life. She comes to understand that, to Miss Lottie, the
marigolds had represented an act of rebellion against the 'ugliness and sterility' of her
impoverished life. Now, as an adult, Lizabeth confesses that she has planted marigolds as her
own act of rebellion, during moments of her life when everything had seemed 'barren' and
hopeless.

 

Yet, there are times when
the image of those passionate yellow mounds returns with a painful poignancy. For one does not
have to be ignorant and poor to find that his life is as barren as the dusty yards of our town.
And I too have planted marigolds.