Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after
working hours.
All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first
glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences
in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands,
trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the
sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were
introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the
persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to
find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of
the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower
seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came
through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to
follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs's story, but insist
that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend
has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the
roads to freedom.
I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields, looking for the
damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon
turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like
cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem.
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