There are flowers stretching on for half a mile in every direction. To my left, a solid red hue blends into a smear of crimson as the field stretches on into the distance. Directly ahead of me at the far end of the red is a rectangle of brilliant yellow, with half of its growth on the side of the red, and the other half on my right side, where it meets a purple so deep it looks as if it were a navy blue. A single path lined with stone meanders through the growth off into the distance, marking a division between the purple and the red, and cutting directly cutting the yellow in two at the far end of the field. The path is lined with small iron stakes with rope strung between them to mark the boundaries. A few paces ahead of me, one of the poles is bent, and a path of crushed purple cuts across the field towards a small shed in the distance. The broken green stalks bleed a clear liquid, and the purple petals caught in the violence lay crushed against the matted green stalks. Such a shame - this destruction in the face of such perfection.

Returning my eyes to the path before me, I notice that every few feet, a small dark line traces its way across the stone path, from the purple to the red. Upon closer inspection, the trail becomes the damp, slimy, slightly sticky discharge of a snail’s locomotion. In the cracks between the cobblestones are little ants the color of wine, pouring like sand through an hourglass. They are carrying their precious cargo, tiny pure white eggs from somewhere deep in the purple across the path to the red. Indeed, the exodus sees to include a pair of frogs shyly eyeing me before making a mad, clumsy dash across the path to the red. Their damp bodies leave little wet splotches on the stone, and where they land, little pieces of sand and leaves stick to them. I watch them fight their way into the denser greenery of the red, undoubtedly off to clean themselves. Grasshoppers teeter precariously on the extremities of growth of the purple, and make huge soaring leaps across the path into the red. Flocks of wrens explode out of the purple growth in groups, melding and morphing in the sky on their way to the red, like a school of fish in retreat.

Meandering on, I become aware of the difference in smell the red side exudes from the purple side. Leaning over the red rewards my senses with a warm, thick smell that immediately reminds me of the smell of crushed raspberries from my childhood. Every summer, when the raspberries we grew around the parameter of the family garden were ripe, we picked them in one fell swoop, all in one day. Half were frozen, and the other half we crushed into old wooden barrels that were stained a dark crimson from years of use. The juices went into almost every dessert my mother made for the next six months. Raspberry syrup, raspberry lemonade, raspberry angel food… the list goes on. Jerking me out of my reverie is the angry buzz of a rather large bumblebee, and along with several of his buddies, they herd me along the path with little darts and swoops, like policemen evacuating a crime scene. The sudden change of mood dampens my spirits, and I hurry along, past the point the red and purple become solid yellow, and off into the spring air.

I lose my job today. That goddamn woman… purple? What the fuck? 39 years of work - a life’s passion - down the drain. She had one simple task, to order the seeds in two colors, red and yellow. Label them accordingly. You couldn’t imagine the look of disbelief on my face when I took my morning walk through the fields. This morning was the first blooming of the season. I’d been waiting weeks for this day. That goddamn woman…

The sun crests the hills in the distance, and immediately, the fields come alive. The low-lying morning fog stirs into action, and slowly begins to flow down both gentle slopes toward the path in the center. For a few moments, the cool, mismatched cobblestones disappear beneath the fog, and then, as the sun warms it just a few degrees, it vanishes, leaving billions of little gems hanging from the stalks of the flowers. The flowers in the distance are lost in the brilliance of the sunlight refracting through the droplets. This is the moment that the flowers begin to bloom, with the pods cracking into four pieces that peel back as if in slow motion, revealing red petals all along the left side of the path, stretching as far as these old eyes can see. I follow the blooming, a wave of color ripping across the sea of green. The red turns to yellow in the distance - a brilliant, vibrant yellow that looks as if it were aflame.

My eyes cross the path at the opposite end of the field, and trace the second patch of yellow down to where the red should begin. Red however, is not the color before me, and my euphoric high crumbles like an avalanche gaining speed in a single damning sweep of my eyes down field to the right of the path. Purple. Ugly, indecisive purple. The color of bruised flesh. The color of decomposing bodies. Purple. The color heralding the end of a 39 year career as the royal gardener. “That god-damn woman” was the first thing that crossed the chasm between what I should be seeing, and what I am seeing. Purple will not do.

“The purple must go!” I screamed into the cool morning air, which had a scent that was already being tainted by the abomination to my right. “I’ll mow it down,” I said to a bumblebee nearby. “I’ll burn the clippings. I’ll bury the ashes. Tell all your friends; the purple must go!”

I turned, and with a certain sense of deliberate destructiveness, I stepped over that little iron and rope barrier and slooshed my way through the purple, leaving broken bleeding stalks behind me, grinding the petals beneath my feet. This was the most direct path to the tool shed and the beast of a mower I kept there, along with the old tin gasoline cans with rusty bottoms, and the end of this nightmare.