MIDDLE GROVE, N.Y., Jan. 4 — The flags are cut from rolls of yellow plastic tablecloth, then woven onto thin wire rods. Each is about as long as a man’s size 7 shoe, as wide as an outstretched hand.
They stand on a sloped corner field framed by a row of conifer trees in this upstate hamlet, spreading in concentric circles like ripples on still water.
From afar, the flags look like clumsily painted dots, an amateur installation of elusive meaning. A closer look yields a clue: a laminated sign with bold black numbers that match the number of flags on the field, numbers that climb almost by the day.
On Sunday, there were 3,000 yellow flags on the ground. By Thursday, five more.
“Just imagine if instead of flags, there were soldiers standing here,” Caren Crootof said as she walked across the field, replacing flags torn or toppled by rain and wind.
Mrs. Crootof, 54, makes the flags, cutting the plastic with scissors on her kitchen table. She plants them most mornings before going to work as a midwife, on the one-acre plot next to the 19th-century farmhouse where she and her husband raised three children. First, she checks a Web site that provides a daily tally of the number of American soldiers killed in the war in Iraq. Then she takes to the field, updates the sign and plants the flags.
