I considered the petals in my hand. Historically, thinkers have overlooked such things, but Ella Lyman Cabot, a nineteenth-century American philosopher, once wrote of a moment not unlike the one Carol and I were having with Becca and her flowers. Cabot had taken a group of children (she used her family fortune to foster dozens) to pick cherries, and one of the little ones had handed her three of them, not to eat but just to see. At first Cabot didn’t even know what she was looking at, but then it struck her: “And again, I knew that we were dull, stupid, and blasphemous not to see the
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