A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Beverly, MA)

And the dry land, the very dust of the earth, every day revealed to me some new miracle of a flower. Coming home from school one warm noon, I chanced to look down, and saw for the first time the dry roadside all starred with lavender-tinted flowers, scarcely larger than a pin-head; fairy-flowers, indeed; prettier than anything that grew in gardens. It was the red sand-wort; but why a purple flower should be called red, I do not know. I remember holding these little amethystine blossoms like jewels in the palm of my hand, and wondering whether people who walked along that road knew what beautiful things they were treading upon. I never found the flower open except at noonday, when the sun was hottest. The rest of the time it was nothing but an insignificant, dusty-leaved weed,--a weed that was transformed into a flower only for an hour or two every day. It seemed like magic. The busy people at home could tell me very little about the wild flowers, and when I found a new one I thought I was its discoverer. I can see myself now leaning in ecstasy over a small, rough-leaved purple aster in a lonely spot on the hill, and thinking that nobody else in all the world had ever beheld such a flower before, because I never had. I did not know then, that the flower-generations are older than the human race. The commonest blossoms were, after all, the dearest, because they were so familiar. Very few of us lived upon carpeted floors, but soft green grass stretched away from our door-steps, all golden with dandelions in spring. Those dandelion fields were like another heaven dropped down upon the earth, where our feet wandered at will among the stars. What need had we of luxurious upholstery, when we could step out into such splendor, from the humblest door?