The potential for beauty is here on the meadow, as it is in a practice room full of actors at a play’s first rehearsal. Under dull gray skies and without sun, even wine and red colored berry brush, the golden grasses, and yellow skunk cabbage leaves look drab. I imagine the plants as hung over or exhausted from working a second shift at a Toys R Us. An east wind fills the director’s role by ruffling the plants into action.

When the sun burns through, I stop more often to take pictures of the colorful plants, now actors with beauty enhanced by makeup. Aki acts like a nine year old at the theatre, suffering through Shakespeare, waiting to be rescued by intermission or the bard’s fart jokes