How does the narrator describe her garden, and what does the description signify?

The way
the narrator describes their yard in this story is significant not only in her description of
the physical place, but also in the way the narrator describes and relates to the house that
sits behind the yard.

The narrator describes her yard,
in the opening lines of the story, as an extension of her living room. The yard is swept clean
as a floor and anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes
that never come inside the house. This shows that the yard is open for others to come and visit
with her, and also that it is more physically comfortable to sit outside than sit inside. The
narrator also makes references to her old house which burnt down, scarring her daughter
physically and emotionally. The narrator tells us that she has deliberately turned [her] back
on the house.

In this story, the narrator feels more at
home in her yard than she does inside her house. By extension, she is rejecting the artifacts
that her daughter Dee (Wangero) is so intent on removing from that house and displaying instead
of using. For the narrator, these objects and places have practical uses: the quilt is for
keeping warm, the house is for sheltering, the churn top is for making butter. For Dee, they
have ethnocultural uses: the quilt is for hanging, the house is for visiting, the churn is to be
displayed as a centerpiece. For the narrator, the yard is somewhere she feels comfortable for
practical reasons: its where she does what shes good atkilling and cleaning animals using her
rough, man-working handsand where she can, with her daughter, [sit] there just enjoying,
until it was time to go in the house and go to bed. For Dee, the yard was a site to photograph:
to document and reinforce her feelings of authenticity at having grown up on a poor
farm.