How do you think Lizabeth's destruction of Miss Lottie’s marigolds relates to her transition from adolescence to adulthood?

Lizabeth's reaction to her own actions speaks to her transition from adolescence to adulthood. As a child, her participation in purposely frustrating Miss Lottie, pushing the old woman, making fun of her, and in essence regularly bullying the old woman was a game. Lizabeth's final act was an act of desperation, the act of a young woman detroying the beauty in someone else's life because she lacked beauty in her own. Hearing her father cry and listening as her mother took on the what Lizabeth saw as her father's role was not only eye opening...... it was the end of her world as she knew it. Destroying the flowers and inadvertently coming to see the woman as a sad, broken soul, whose flowers were stood as a symbol of beauty marked the transition.

I had never heard a man cry before. I did not know men ever cried. I covered my ears with my hands but could not cut off the sound of my father’s harsh, painful, despairing sobs.

The world had lost its boundary lines. My mother, who was small and soft, was now the strength of the family; my father, who was the rock on which the family had been built, was sobbing like the tiniest child. Everything was suddenly out of tune, like a broken accordion. Where did I fit into this crazy picture?

For as I gazed at the immobile face with the sad, weary eyes, I gazed upon a kind of reality which is hidden to childhood. The witch was no longer a witch but only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness and sterility.