A flowery meadow

You can almost hear them. Not the flowers, the bees would be gone by now, the day winding itself down, but the grass settling, the air thickening as the sun drops behind the trees.

I almost walked past. The path turns here and you're meant to keep going, around the bend toward the trailhead and the car. But the light caught the meadow at exactly the wrong angle to ignore, the kind of slanted gold that turns ordinary things into something briefly holy. Buttercups, mostly. A few stems of grass gone to seed.

I knelt down. From up high they were a yellow blur, but down at flower-height the meadow turned into a small wilderness, each stem its own line of light, the bigger world soft and out of focus behind them.

There's a version of this walk where I don't kneel. Where I keep moving because the car is close and dinner is waiting. I think about that version sometimes. About how often I take it without knowing.