Larry was five years old and he loved holidays. But the one coming up gave him a problem.
Labor Day, his father explained, was a day set aside in honor of working people — to show that belonging to the laboring class was something dignified, something to be proud of. It wasn’t like Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July. Larry hadn’t labored. He had no share in it.
That bothered him considerably.
But then a thought came to him, and for the next few days Larry was very busy indeed. His family assumed he was doing what he usually did in the far corner of the garden — making mud pies, poking at things, the ordinary business of five-year-olds.
They were wrong.
On the morning of Labor Day, Larry led his father and mother, his grown-up sister, and his fourteen-year-old brother to the very far corner of the yard.
There was a little garden. Neat paths bordered with pretty pebbles. Ferns that Larry had carefully transplanted from the woods, each one in its place. And in the center, standing up proudly in its own small bed, a tiny red geranium — the one that had been growing in a pot in his nursery.
“You see,” said Larry, “I wanted to have a holiday today. I mean, I wanted to have a right to the holiday — the way daddy said laborers have. So I’ve labor-ed too.” It was a hard word to say. He managed it well.
He looked up at his family. “Don’t you think I can have a little share in Labor Day? A real little share?”
His family said yes.
