Today on my way home I passed a field of second harvest alfalfa, and I stopped short on my bike and sat in it for a spell.  Funny that it had never occasioned a second glance from me until now. But the way the evening sun, only just above the mountains, shone gold off the beautiful carpet of green whose deep color shone in the shadows, drew me to say and contemplate for a bit. The wind blew a chilly clip from the west, and I suppose that part of my attraction to so much green was spurred by a notion that soon all would be brown. I sit here now, gazing at the idyllic silence. I am in the eye of a storm of human bustle: College to the east, Shields to the west, Drake to the south and Prospect to the north. But here it is calm. No traffic. No people. No angry motorists honking horns and speeding to get home to eat a dinner and watch television. Here it is calm. Somehow this beautiful place remains, to a certain extent, within nature's domain. A simple dirt road, the kind with a grass strip down the middle where tires never tread, leads off to the west towards a grove a trees. It's the kind of road that you want to follow, for you feel sure something perfect lies at the end. In the end you don't follow it, because it may turn out not to be as perfect as you imagine. Better to live on believing it is. The rolled hay bales cast giant blue shadows toward me, and my eye can almost pick out every single sun ray flowing across the expanse of green to meet its terrestrial target. The moon is up beside me, about 45  off the field. We are both looking west, and I can see the line on its white surface where light and dark meet, as they do where I now sit. The autumn sky is falling into a deeper shade of blue, and the clouds are ever gaining altitude, giving the sky a look of enormity. Fall is here. I am content to sit and watch.