Office Park Beauty
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
Usually reflected perfectly in the water, the trees are merely dark smudges in the lake top on this overcast day. The water seems particularly unfriendly, unwilling to smile back at the nature nearby or the sky – fogged by cloudy weather that has blocked the sun for two days straight.
Utility poles with the lines between them swooping off into the horizon stand rigid as though they were struck into the ground to catch flashes from an ensuing lightning storm. They are staked along the roadsides and the winding gray asphalt the delivery trucks follow and the T-shirted corporate workers on break work and jog along between office parks.
This is a drab day, all the way around, worsened by its placement early in the week and yet somehow brighter since it’s not Monday. Far out from the broad office windows framing the world I see – maybe three miles or so – there seems to be a rough line of treetops beyond which nothing can be seen. In the foreground are medical buildings, trucking distributors, bottling companies and other manufacturers and a spherical water tower upon which is a white-flashing light, the most vivid point in the entire landscape.
The clouds that far out are cream-colored, which brings some hope to the day the rain might hold off. If it doesn’t, though, the windshields and truck beds on the vehicles abandoned in the expansive parking lots since the day’s earliest hours will catch the precipitation. So will the dead spots in the pavement, the dips in the small grass patches framed by the sidewalks and hard things.
The benches are empty out by the lake. The day has picked up a chill that will shift over the next three weeks before giving way to bitter cold in November. I was running late last night and the frogs that burrow into the suburban lawns in our neighborhood were basking on the pavement lit by street lamps. Several were taking in deep breaths of mild weather before going off to try to survive the winter in window wells.
Now, the squirrels and rabbits, the moths and butterflies, and the robins do something similar in this scene I’m taking in, enjoying the air for the last time before it crisps and is turns into a killer.
There is an odd mixture of the natural and the man-made here in these rectangles I see, and there’s no question which is more attractive. But what is truly beautiful is also so often missed, especially in the common of northeast Kansas where an empty field with feather-topped weeds is a spot to be developed for progress’ sake, not something to behold. I look out and force myself to envy the parking lots when I’d rather be lakeside.
