Raking hay on a rough slope, when I was about sixteen, I drove to the ridgetop and saw in a neighbor’s field on the other side a pond in a swale, and around it the whole field filled with chicory in bloom, blue as the sky reflected in the pond— bluer even, and somehow lighter, though they belonged to gravity. They were the morning’s blossoms and would not last. But I go back now in my mind to when I drew the long windrow to the top of the rise, and I see the blue-flowered field, holding in its center the sky-reflecting pond. It seems, as then, another world in this world, such as a pilgrim
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