We climbed two mountains in the Pliny Range of New Hampshire today. On the ridge, spring’s arrival was creeping upward toward winter’s exit. Low on the ridge, wildflowers reached away from the path. The red trillium is the most beautiful and amazing of them all. It grows out of a rhizome, and the leaves aren’t true leaves (the true leaves apparently live underground). It puts out a single bloom. A world that can produce something so stunning in a scrubby woods in the North Country—with no humans tending them in greenhouses, no cultivation, no planning—is a world I want to know. I will not reveal where I saw this flower. It’s too amazing.

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