Free All Flesh Is Grass by Clifford D. Simak

out, had anybody else. He had planted them in a special bed and had tended them with care and the flowers had responded gratefully underneath his hands. So that today there were few flower beds in the village that did not have some of those purple flowers, my father’s special flowers.
    â€œThose flowers of his,” asked Nancy. “Did he ever find what kind of flowers they were?”
    â€œNo,” I said, “he didn’t.”
    â€œHe could have sent one of them to the university or someplace. Someone could have told him exactly what he’d found.”
    â€œHe talked of it off and on. But he never got around to really doing it. He always kept so busy. There were so many things to do. The greenhouse business keeps you on the run.”
    â€œYou didn’t like it, Brad?”
    â€œI didn’t really mind it. I’d grown up with it and I could handle it. But I didn’t have the knack. Stuff wouldn’t grow for me.”
    She stretched, touching the roof with balled fists.
    â€œIt’s good to be back,” she said. “I think I’ll stay a while. I think Father needs to have someone around.”
    â€œHe said you planned to write.”
    â€œHe told you that?”
    â€œYes,” I said, “he did. He didn’t act as if he shouldn’t.”
    â€œOh, I don’t suppose it makes any difference. But it’s a thing that you don’t talk about—not until you’re well along on it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don’t want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start.”
    â€œAnd when you write,” I asked, “what will you write about?”
    â€œAbout right here,” she said. “About this town of ours.”
    â€œMillville?”
    â€œWhy, yes, of course,” she said. “About the village and its people.”
    â€œBut,” I protested, “there is nothing here to write about.”
    She laughed and reached out and touched my arm. “There’s so much to write about,” she said. “So many famous people. And such characters.”
    â€œFamous people?” I said, astonished.
    â€œThere are,” she said, “Belle Simpson Knowles, the famous novelist, and Ben Jackson, the great criminal lawyer, and John M. Hartford, who heads the department of history at …”
    â€œBut those are the ones who left,” I said. “There was nothing here for them. They went out and made names for themselves and most of them never set foot in Millville again, not even for a visit.”
    â€œBut,” she said, “they got their start here. They had the capacity for what they did before they ever left this village. You stopped me before I finished out the list. There are a lot of others. Millville, small and stupid as it is, has produced more great men and women than any other village of its size.”
    â€œYou’re sure of that?” I asked, wanting to laugh at her earnestness, but not quite daring to.
    â€œI would have to check,” she said, “but there have been a lot of them.”
    â€œAnd the characters,” I said. “I guess you’re right. Millville has its share of characters. There are Stiffy Grant and Floyd Caldwell and Mayor Higgy …”
    â€œThey aren’t really characters,” said Nancy. “Not the way you think of them. I shouldn’t have called them characters to start with. They’re individualists. They’ve grown up in a free and easy atmosphere. They’ve not been forced to conform to a group of rigid concepts and so they’ve been themselves. Perhaps the only truly unfettered human beings who still exist today can be found in little villages like this.”
    In all my life I’d never heard anything like this. Nobody had ever told me that Higgy Morris was an