Visions from the surface

I went walking past the new light rail station. From a car or from the bus it looks all new and shiny and oh so anticipatory of the trains and the people who will surely come when it opens for service this fall. But as I walked I saw that already there are marks of displeasure or inattentiveness or perhaps, and I regret to say this because I want things to be different, marks of disdain at something that looks so new and shiny and a little out of sync with people's lives. By the trail a box of paper litter dumped some weeks ago has now begun to creep outward exploring the space that is so nicely manicured and tempting for paper, and for an empty can and a bottle, and oh, the box itself that has moved some distance to explore a tree.
Artwork carved with the remnants of the trees that used to line this pathway into the city are imaginative and quickly grab the delighted attention of grandchildren and grandparents as they move down the trail but also draw the eye of graffiti artisans who are lightning fast in their strikes against unadulterated creativity. Crude carvings and words that should not be sounded out by beginning readers can only be discerned from close up. I take a picture and send a text "please attend to this, and this and this."
We go on our scheduled walk to buy tea and chocolate with a rambunctious three and a half year old holding not always as tightly as we would like to our hands. A pungent odor greets us as we move past the immigrant worker who stops and smiles before continuing to pump the unpleasant chemical onto the unsuspecting weeds merely poking through the ground where they always had before. I wonder "Will this harm the child as she breathes it in? What about us old people and the worker himself?" We notice that wherever he has passed the fledgling weeds, the out of place shoots of spring, are now painted in a not so natural blue green color. What is that stuff? Does it really take more time and money to pull the little green shoots out of the ground if they are not wanted?
Near the house we see a patch of dandelions and stop to pick them grateful that they are colored "dandelion green and yellow" with no residue of poison. The chickens love to eat them. In the not so distant past our ancestors ate them too, packed as they are with the spring's first edible vitamin C -- but that was long before someone somewhere decided that new and shiny means not very real.