The summer after Hurricane Michael a Titus 2 student and I stopped and dug up a clump of black eyed Susan wildflowers on our little road that were in jeopardy of being run down by trucks coming in and out pulling out downed trees in the acreage across the road from us. We set them by a fenced area where they can seed for next year. We enjoyed them until they went to seed. She asked me if they were weeds or flowers. I told her it depended on one’s perspective. I told her about a passage from John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga I’d read years ago that had stuck with me. She wanted to read it. I looked it up (much easier in today’s world with the internet than looking through years of handwritten journals!) “Love is not a hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always, wild!”
In retrospect, I’m tnot sure that was the best literary imagery to share with a young woman prone to bad relationships….