RAGDALE FIELDS
When the breezes blew, my heart would sway. I had never seen movement so graceful as moved the tips of the stalks reaching up, reaching out through the dawn haze. I was part of them. I had never seen in nature the color the field grasses had become as the summer waned. A mauve -- a golden mauve that captured the glint of the early morning sun.
I would walk through these grasses every morning before breakfast, planning my day, thinking through word problems, sentence problems, paragraph problems, chapter problems. These were the only challenges I was meeting during the weeks at Ragdale, a writer's camp that allowed me to be a writer and forget my real estate bill or an ailing neighbor or an exhausting work schedule.
As I was protected by the isolation of Ragdale, the grasses were protected by environmental statute and I respected it and so, them. I gazed upon them for two and a half weeks, each precious stalk. I touched them gently. I photographed them from the pathway and from within their fields. I wanted to remember every shade they reflected, every dip they made in the breeze. I knew that was all I could take home of them.
One morning, though, I heard a grinding, buzzing sound interrupt the morning quiet, before I was ready for my pre-breakfast stroll. I looked out toward the field and I saw a thrasher whipping down the grasses. They lay like defeated warriors on a barren battlefield. "Why?" I wondered and was told, as I rushed out to witness the desecration, that the ground is leveled every year to ready it for the fund-raising gala that culminates in a huge bonfire. The grasses were too dangerously close.
In an unthinking moment I was out following the thrasher, grabbing up what stalks I could rescue, before anyone in authority could warn me that dead or alive, the grasses were protected and could not be moved, could not be touched by unofficial hands. I swept great bundles of them into my arms and rushed to my car to secret them away in my trunk. "These will live on," I promised. An overly dramatic gesture since no one seemed to be closing in on me to confiscate my contraband. And an unfulfillable promise.
The grasses stayed in my car trunk until my camp session ended. On the way home I stopped in a garden store and bought a tall white urn to hold them. Tall to balance their lengthy elegance and white to complement their subtle coloring.
The sun bursts through my windows now and finds the grasses each morning. It is unmercifully drying them out and fading away their color. Other than in my memory they have lost their glory. Still, when I look at them I am again wandering through the fields, marveling at what simple beauty they displayed.
