Nature Observation #3

From One Sun to Another

I walk along the sidewalk after class. It is a bright, blustery day, but the wind does not bite as hard as it often does. Still, I scrunch my shoulders and wrap my coat sleeves around my hands to keep them from the cold. I feel the wind glide around my jacket-encapsulated torso, and I am grateful the material breaks the wind instead of allowing it through to my core. I do not do well in the cold. I walk quickly on to minimize my continued time in the cold, and as the sun’s heat does what it can to warm my face, something jumps out at me from the corner of my eye. I turn to look behind my shoulder, trying to find it again. I backtrack a few paces and there it is. The grass glints varying hues of green all around, and the season has spewed the dead brown leaves throughout the blades. The ground is a canvas of this uniform green and brown pattern. One thing has disrupted it. Up from the range of little green shoots and crumpled brown leaves rises a bright yellow flower. It is probably some kind of weed, but its quiet, yet striking existence made me stop in my cold rush. The petals rest on a skinny green stalk that seems underbuilt to support the weight of the bloom. The stalk is thinner and taller than the grass, so it pushes the yellow to stand out and above its peers. The bloom itself is the brightest yellow that could occur. It is brighter than honey, than ripe corn. Its color is so deeply yellow that it seems like it came straight from the sky itself. The rim of the flower forms an outer ring of blades each in the same shape as little baseball bats. A second, thinner ring of blades circles around its fuzzy center. The whole assembly of petals forms a little celestial halo rising up from the greenery. I can tell it has tried hard to absorb the sun’s nourishment, as it does not just grow up like a tree, but it grows deliberately facing the sun in the sky. The flower looks like one sun reaching as far as it can towards another sun.