Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 254

Once, then -- for how many years or how few does not matter -- my world was bound round by fences, when I was too small to reach the apple tree bough, to twist my knee over it and pull myself up.

That world was in scale with my own smallness.

I have no picture in my mind of the garden as a whole -- that I could not see -- but certain aspects of certain corners linger in the memory: wind-blown, frost-bitten, white chrysanthemums beneath a window, with their brittle brown leaves and their sharp scent of November ; ;

ripe pears lying in long grass, to be turned over by a dusty-slippered foot, cautiously, lest bees still worked in the ragged, brown-edged holes ; ;

hot-colored verbenas in the corner between the dining-room wall and the side porch, where we passed on our way to the pump with the half-gourd tied to it as a cup by my grandmother for our childish pleasure in drinking from it.