A Roadside Field

The following piece was published recently in the Santa Ynez Valley News and is therefore copyrighted. As a consequence I must rescind my usual policy of open permission to use it. RLG
Have you chanced to drive to Los Alamos this spring? If you had, and if you had come in from the southern exit off the 101, you would have braked at the stop sign. And there as you paused you would have noticed a tree just across Bell Street and behind it a small field glorious beyond all joy with brilliant color. Late last fall, as the days grew shorter and darker , the tree was unremarkable and the field, a vacant lot really, was barren and colorless and scruffy with stubbly grasses. When night fell it was very dark there and on one of those dark nights a young man walking home near that tree and that field was struck by a carelessly driven car  and then left to die. I learned of the tragedy pausing at that stop sign during my mundane to-ing and fro-ing. My eye was drawn across the way to a gathering of  sad silent mourners beside the tree. Although I did not  personally know the young man who died there I saw that he was well loved and much missed. In the following days when I passed by, the nondescript tree was attended by various sized gatherings and sometimes songs and music sounded and sometimes eloquent silence prevailed and gradually the tree sprouted flowers and pictures and mementos at its base and as it slowly became surrounded by bright memories and illuminations of past joys of a life so suddenly vanished even the tree  seemed to slowly transform into a younger and greener and more promising memory of itself. But time wins out, and after many more days the visits became fewer and the flowers around the tree began to wither and the lone pumpkin shriveled and the mementos disappeared and the tree seemed to return once again to its unremarkable former self and the field to just a barren memory, no longer worthy of lingering glances or sad smiles from pausing motorists. To  the casual passersby like me the wintry cold of reality had set in and the beauty of those moments past had slipped from our grasp, as so often happens in life. But where humankind must finally let go and trod on, nature was waiting in infinite patience to celebrate the newest star in its firmament. Very early this spring, when the green hillsides first began to flaunt their ornaments of bright yellow and purple flowers, so too, suddenly, did that dusky featureless field flower abruptly, not in patches or in a half-hearted way but as an entire vast carpet of the most strikingly brilliant gold, interwoven delicately with taller deep purple spears, filling the entire field as if preparing an exquisite cloth for the coronation robe of a king. So spectacular were the colors and so extensively did it blanket the small corner lot behind the tree that once again motorists found it impossible to stop at the stop sign without pausing to pay homage to a ground now so obviously hallowed. And as the spring wore on and the  jeweled hillsides with their gold hued pendants faded as they must and when the glorious yellow and purple blanket beyond the tree seemed destined to diminish as well, suddenly more flowers burst forth in a whole new joyous celebration of reds and blues and all colors of the rainbow like the reprise of a grand aria. And that aria continues even  as I write. This is my first spring in Los alamos and you may try to convince me that this rare display is the result of  seeds  and thoughtful planting and that flowers grow in that field every year, but I will tell you that even had a human agent supplied the canvas and the oils used to paint such a picture those masterful brush strokes could  only have come  from nature, and her inspiration must have been the celebration of a newly arrived soul.

If you chance to drive to Los Alamos this spring, you can see for yourself.