Reflections

*written a few days ago*

I am in a calm peach colored room. The sinking-soft armchairs are peach, the walls are tan with light wood trim. It is dusk. The ceiling lights are inverted bowls; their light spreads softly upwards, and then diffuses around the room. During the day, there is sunlight. It comes down through the frosted glass in the roof, and from the rows of white-trimmed windows on one side. Pairs of short sandstone columns stand outside each window, five stories above the ground, supporting the stone overhang above the deep stone windowledge. Beyond the columns, there are hills underneath layers of clouds. During the day, these are dark-green and white, but at dusk, as the sun sets, they turn gradations of blue. A layer of dark blue hills gives way to lighter layers of blue clouds that disperse going up until the pale blue sky shows through.

During the day, all is a lush bright green. It is summer in this city. On my balcony, there is a pot with four green pea plants crowding for space. One plant is strongest. It has outgrown the others, even sending up a second stalk. One is weakest, struggling to keep up with the plants around it. Still, it grows steadily, shooting out whiskers to grab onto bamboo sticks and a network of strings for support, along with the others.

Growing peas is a technical endeavor. You have to give pea plants things to grab onto as they grow up, so they become big and strong. I stuck two long sticks of bamboo into the soil (that I got from raising a tomato plant in the fall). These sticks are mainly used by the strongest plant. It grows fastest, and takes up all the space. For the others, I made a network of string zig-zagging between the two sticks and a bar in my balcony railing. The strings sag a bit under the weight of the peas, but I haven't thought of the fix yet. Hopefully in a month, I will have delicious green peas to eat.

On my balcony, it is summer, and on the main campus, and in the hills, it is summer. But it rained a bit this week so the cactus garden decided it was spring. The cacti busily shot out spiky buds that grew into red and pink and yellow flowers like hardy tulips with jagged edges. The flowers drew me in, made me want to look closely at the little spiky bumps, they were almost fuzzy with spines, that grew into the bulbs and burst into jagged petals, changing color, until they wilted and grew into fruits that looked deceptively smooth.

I saw a fruit fallen from a cactus once, a few months ago. I picked it up, carefully avoiding the long spines I saw sticking out. A second later, I dropped it and spent five minutes picking out the clusters of small, skin-colored bristles now stuck in my finger-tips.