What does the reader learn about the background and setting of the story from the first four paragraphs of the text?

The reader learns of the impoverished background that the narrator comes from juxtaposed with the marigolds.

I remember only the dry September of the dirt roads and grassless yards of the shantytown where I lived. And one other thing I remember, another incongruency of memory—a brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust—Miss Lottie’s marigolds.