The elm is scatteringits little loavesof sweet smellsfrom a white sky!

The Pyncheon Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the morning sunand a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leaftytongues a-whispering all at once. This ages tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the gale.It has kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of leaves, and the whole in perfect verdure,except a single branch, that, by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the autumn,had been transmuted to bright gold.

A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.

Smell that! That's gasoline you smell in there. You can't buy any perfume in the world that smells as sweet.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

--From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962

Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they'd follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by.