The rain came in the night, the leading edge of a massive front from the southwest, stretching from St. Louis to somewhere beyond Texas. A sort of nagging drizzle accompanied this morning’s gray, just enough to make you need your wipers, especially when meeting a tractor trailer rig or following the Fed Ex guy toward Troy. The combination of rain and road spray kept a film over the windshield in between the intermittent passes of the wiper blades. Just kind of a miserable morning, really. Cool, damp and gray.

But there was something in that light.

When I chanced a look out the side window, I realized that something in the filtering of cloud and rain provided the perfect spectrum of light to turn the morning landscape into a thing of surreal beauty. I’ve never lived in a place of such varied native grasses. Perhaps accented by an unusual regularity of rain throughout the summer and even through September, there is a splendor in this year’s crop. Shades of beige and brown, green and orange, even lavenders and reds move through the grasses growing on ditch banks and fields, roadsides and fencerows. Seed heads lift clusters of white and beige on slender stalks above the blades.

In this morning’s strangely perfect light, every color seemed to have a soft glow. They all mingled and flowed, blending into a wonderful texture and pattern.  Alongside a creek in the Wolf River bottom, a small patch of sumac accented its distinct crimson, surrounded by the harvest tans of a ripening bean field. Along the ditch lines, scrub oak and towering cottonwood stood in darker contrast. Even the cattails show greens, yellows, tans and browns.

I took in the side views as much as I could while I drove past, wishing we could stop for a while, linger in the slow rain without worrying about what was next on the To Do list or what priorities might re-shuffle the whole morning’s schedule. I took it in as best I could, wondering how this small pleasure could seem like such a spectacle, how nothing more than autumn grass could make the driving pass so finely.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more beautiful miserable morning.

H. Arnett

10/08/09