Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Unexplained Color



Just the other day I did the Queen Anne's Lace in this weed patch in Golden Gate Park near the corner of Stanyan and Fulton in San Francisco, which is where I wait for the bus most afternoons after finishing my work day at the library. Never in my twenty years of catching the bus on this corner has such lush growth existed here before, and there are two obvious reasons for that – 1.) an unusually rainy winter, just concluded (or in truth NOT concluded, since it rained as recently as yesterday) and, 2.) the absence of gardeners to constrain all this vegetable vigor. Both the City of San Francisco and the State of California are really only just now coming to real-life terms with the aftereffects of the financial meltdown of 2008. It has taken this long for ordinary people on the street like me (ordinary lucky people, I should say, meaning those who still have jobs) to see basic government services starting to fall into abeyance – a taste of what the future holds in store, no doubt. Though of course the failures of the future will be on a much grander scale.

But I digress. What I want to know about these pictures above is, "Where are those bright red grass blades coming from?" They are growing right in the middle of a clump of luxuriant but quite conventional green grass, yet just these half dozen blades are bright red. I am confused.