In early July a friend brought me in a big bunch of sweet peas. I buried my face in their sweetness; then, as I held them off, I sighed.
"Oh, dear!" I said.
"What's 'oh, dear'?" said Jonathan, as he took off his ankle-clips. He had just come up from the station on his bicycle.
"Nothing. Only why do people have magenta sweet peas with red ones and pink ones—that special pink? It's just the color of pink tooth-powder."
"You might throw away the ones you don't like."
"No, I can't do that. But why does anybody grow them? If I had sweet peas, I'd have white ones, and pale lavender ones, and those lovely salmon-pink ones, and maybe some pale yellow ones—"
"Sweet peas have to be planted in March," said Jonathan, as he trundled his wheel off toward the barn.
"Of course," I called after him, "I'm not going to plant any. I was only saying if."
Perhaps the sweet peas began it, but I really think the whole thing began with the phlox.
One afternoon in August I walked down the road through the woods to meet Jonathan. As he came up to me and dismounted I held out to him a spray of white phlox.