The Many Hues of Life

The large field, changing from light green to a darker shade of green when the sun and clouds created shadows rolling over it, immediately drew the tired blue eyes of the weary traveler. His face, gray from the exhaustion of hiking for days, brightened at his first glimpse of the black and orange monarch butterflies flitting over the tall yellow goldenrod stalks.

He laid his dirty brown coat on the ground underneath a sheltering tree filled with blossoms ranging from the palest of pink to scarlet red. The tattered coat was held together with black duct tape and had seen better days. He refused to discard it for something new, however, because it had been given to him one Christmas long ago by a young woman.

He remembered the first time he met her at their high school senior dance, he in worn dark khaki jeans with lighter khaki shirt, she in a new cotton dress of indigo trimmed in deep plum lace. To the young boy, her dress perfectly matched her dark violet eyes.

The old man, years later and miles from that school, looked silently over the field. With a sigh as deep as the silvery depth of the nearby lake, he turned to stare sightlessly up at the sky. The light blue sky turning slowly to the rose blush of late afternoon seemed filled with birds with plumages of teal. In his imagination, they seemed to be singing good-bye to the descending sun.

With the birds disappearing into the distance, their beautiful bodies turning to a light teal the further away they flew, the man slipped into sleep with only the cool moon to watch over him.

Word count = 285