…It sprung up at the end of a forest passage, and from a distance it looked cheerful and festive, luminous with its incredibly pure and even yellowness. I came closer: it was an abandoned field, long untilled and unsown, now overgrown with some short, bushy plants. Suddenly they gave out a breath of pleasing, bitter-flowery aroma. “Why, it’s rocket cress “– I remembered a botany atlas read long ago – “a kind of weed…”
A fresh wind ran over the living carpet; the entire field stirred in iridescent golden waves reaching to the shady wall of the forest in a striking contrast of bright yellow and dark green, “like a priceless bowl set in malachite” – was the simile that crossed my mind.
High in the hot June sky a black kite was gliding. The heat presaged a storm. Over the western horizon a huge cloud was hanging darkly, heavy with rain. And only overhead the jagged, quickly shifting, cloud rims, blindingly bright as if made of molten silver, radiated an unbearable light. The wind grew stronger, the rocket cress inflorescences were swinging fast as if performing some exotic dance.
A passionate and unending jingle was coming from the host of invisible larks. It seemed that in anticipation of the storm everything was singing - the flowers, the forest and this field far removed from any human settlement. But look – warm gray nuggets dove from the sky and froze, suspended over the brushes of golden rocket cress; some larks made rounds over the field, from flower to flower, filling the area with a non-stop peeping; others, quickly fluttering their little wings, would soar vertically then hang some four-five yards over the ground, loudly singing their paeans to life.
The pre-storm clouds piled up over the entire sky, blue-pinkish in spots, as if fired from inside; now I saw that only a rather small bluish window remained over the forest, streaming a wide, straight cascade of sunbeams to the ground and swamping the whole of summer’s aromatic bloom in a soft warm light. Meanwhile, snow-like aspen dawn was silently whirling through the electrified air. Then the deafening thunder exploded from some unknown spot and the first few large raindrops loudly whipped the golden rocket cress blossoms. As the averse broke out it looked instantly as if the whole of living nature, liberated, sighed with relief, as all the trees, birds and animals reveled in this rain - sparkling, chaotic, spun from thick jets of water.
Wet to the bone, alone in the midst of a misty field that suddenly fell silent as if weighed down by the elements, I, too, quietly basked in the enchanting bliss of a being who just once, or at most twice a year gets to witness and experience nature’s splendid upheaval.