The Speaker
This poem's speaker is not named or identified. They are evidently a traveler stopping at a filling station. Initially, this traveler is distressed by and even somewhat judgmental about the state of the station, paying attention to its failures—its dirtiness, its danger, and the lack of refinement among the family who owns it. However, the speaker's attentiveness to visual detail (a signature of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry in general) allows them to overcome this tendency to judge, eventually seeing the beauty of the setting. They turn their attention to items like a begonia and an embroidered doily. Following the thread of these observations, the speaker realizes that a person must have deliberately, and lovingly, created these touches. Thus, it is through their capacity for close attention to their physical surroundings that the speaker moves from a place of criticism to one of appreciation.
The Family
The unnamed characters who run the filling station make up a family—a father, a few sons, and possibly a mother (or another woman) conducting the feminized domestic tasks the speaker enumerates. This family is not, initially, appealing to the speaker. They are dirty and covered in oil, and they seem bound to the unglamorous world of the filling station. They wear ill-fitting, oily clothes and conduct necessary but non-prestigious work. Despite this rough exterior, the family evidently is bound by love. They work together and care for one another through acts that soften the difficulty of everyday life, such as the watering of a plant.
