Cor van den Heuvel

Yellow

I remember once when I was a little boy walking along a sidewalk in a quiet part of town. There was no one else around, no cars moving on the street and none, or few, parked along it. It was a bright, sunny morning in the summer. I came to a red fire hydrant and saw that the curbstone in front of it for about ten feet on either side had just been freshly painted a bright yellow. The paint glittered wetly. An open can was standing on the walk at one end of the painted stone. It was half full of the brilliant paint, and its top edge glimmered with wet paint that had dripped in yellow petals partway down the outside. A brush still yellow with paint was lying on the turned-over cover next to the can. The painter was nowhere to be seen. The silence was immense.

Somehow the sunshine of that day shone with and in that yellow paint with such a primal light that it still shines down through the years in my mind: the wet band of golden stone blazing coolly in the middle of a day of magic sunshine—and the yellow can blooming at one end of it like a great golden flower.

a field of buttercups
in the stillness of noon
the sound of a brook