The flower I call morning glory (probably Mexican heather run wild) only blooms overnight, and this morning there are over a dozen of the gentle lavender flowers perched in quiet greeting on their slender green stalks. Nearby a frog croaks lazily, and birds are already busy looking for seeds. The sky is an enormous and cloudless blue.
But many miles away I discover that someone has felled every pine tree in the front yard of a house that must have recently exchanged hands. One day those magnificent trees loom tall and the next are felled and lying strewn like beached whales. Fifty or sixty or ninety years to grow and only a moment to be cut down. The trees lie silent and uncomplaining as they die, their rich green needles turning like an unaccustomed autumn to red then yellow. It is a glimpse of our own deaths: so many years to grow and achieve a sense of who we are and then to fade away, perhaps not as violently, or perhaps for many in the world more violently and in not so many years.