521 prompt - Sept. 4

there was this pause.

"It's unclear," he thought, aloud. "Maybe it's not as I'm putting it."
He put down his pen, re-crossed his legs, and felt the greenness of the grass underneath them this time. There was an undercurrent, a similarity, a livingness to these green things that said they were not brown. They had not died, and he noticed it now.

He looked up and paused at the expanse of terrain before him. Yellow flowers in with the grass at the top of the crest, the pause of the drop and the continue of the green and yellow down to skirt the plateaus that arose at the edges and then on beyond to the mud and waters in the middle. A slow trail from animals leading toward the waters just knowable to the left.

"Perhaps this is not as simple as I'm describing."
The assignment had been clear. He was to author a chapter on carrying capacity for an upcoming edition of Rosewill's Ecology. He had been glad for the opportunity to make a little extra doing writing beyond the pages and pages of course notes and lab procedures. Resources were simple mathematics and he had looked forward to the break.

This morning had been nice, and so he had put aside the mathematics in order to spend a little time looking in the eyes of the enemy. It was only half an hours walk, yet he felt many miles from the straight corners of the office. The steno pad had been simply for any insights into what he'd begun at the office. But the winds had changed direction and the scene looked different now.

He uncrossed his legs, set the pen in his shirt pocket, paused, then rolled slowly up, sighed absent-mindedly, and began walking back.

It was time for some Postum.