sun-filled meadow. The fall sun warmed her face. Then a slight breeze blew toward her and refreshed her. She felt the wind gently push back her hair that shone chestnut-colored in the sunlight. She walked on steadily and halfway across the field saw on the terraced ground above the field dots of color that were the flowers of the garden Jack had shown her group on orientation day. She gazed behind her. All the gray-stone lecture halls and buildings of the academic departments were bathed in a soft, golden light. From where she stood, they seemed less and less intimidating as they sat quietly back, like unused books on a library shelf.
She came to a rise in the field at the far end where it swept upward to meet the garden. Now the tiny dots of color she had seen at a distance enlarged before her into yellow roses, extending toward her like welcoming bouquets. She gazed around the garden into the maze of beds. What at first seemed a confusion of colors had settled into an articulate pattern of beauty—balanced, accented, and amazing. Here, the gardener’s design had met God’s so that grace and beauty bloomed together in a brilliant spectacle. It seemed a symphony of color that she could all but hear. She turned and paused.
At the intersection of two lines of roses, recumbent on a patch of earth just large enough to hold him Jack rested, his arms stretched at right angles from his sides. He looked as if he might be sleeping until he sat up. He wore headphones and in one hand held a book. Veronica thought to move away, afraid she might be intruding. But he saw her.
“Hello,” he yelled, forgetting the headphones.
Veronica laughed. Jack understood why and removed the headphones. Then in normal volume he said hello again. A long silence followed within which Veronica’s mood turned like a weather vane blowing in the wind. At one moment she felt comforted by Jack’s presence and in the very next disturbed by it. What’d been really only a momentary silence seemed an eternity until Jack focused on her and spoke.
“Midterms,” he said.
His one word summed up everything. Veronica realized he knew exactly how she felt. She’d been understood.
“Do you get used to all the work?” she asked, rushing her words.
“I come here quite a bit,” he said.
There was an easy going attitude about Jack and it worked like a charm. In his presence she felt less frazzled, more optimistic. It was pleasing and peaceful to be with him in the same way it was pleasing and peaceful to be in the garden. Jack made a gesture toward a bench in the garden and they went and sat down together.
They sat without speaking and with little need to. But rather than causing additional apprehension the way silence between two people new to each other sometimes can, the quiet moment contributed to their affinity.
Next to each other the two made a remarkable looking couple. Veronica, half Lebanese and half Italian, was as dark in complexion as Jack was fair. She had long dark brown hair that shined chestnut colored in the sunlight. Untied, it fell down over her shoulders in a luxurious wave. Her eyes were almond shaped and deep brown, lending an exotic and alluring look. If those two people had been flowers, they would be a yellow rose and light brown orchid. But they were a young man and woman, beautiful as they were. Glowing in their beginning, radiant in their freshness and magical in their natural state-no more was needed for them to be all there was and ever could be.
“You know what amazes me,” Jack said after a while, scanning the garden. “We can get these flowers to grow all year, but we never take the time to smell them.”
“Sometimes it does seem to me that everything is a mad rush,” Veronica said, gazing around the garden too.
“We have to slow it down. Each person has to regulate their own clock to keep a more even pace,” Jack added.
“How’s that even possible today the way we live? I mean everything we do is done at warp speed. To do otherwise is to be left behind,” Veronica countered, still talking quickly as if to reinforce her point.
“I think it’s as Gandhi said,” Jack went on. “We have to be the change we want to see in the world. There’s no other way. And as I see the world today, no other choice.”
“You’re an idealist,” Veronica said, turning to Jack with a skeptical smile.
“God,” said Jack. “I hope so; I don’t want to be anything less.”
“Okay, but what do you do now? How do you slow it down and reduce the constant tension? I mean we all take midterms, even dreamers, right?” There was a certain street wise quality to Veronica’s analysis.
‘’I’ll show you how I do it. Come on,” Jack said, getting up.
Veronica followed Jack across the field to the student parking lot. Jack’s maroon jeep was far down in the lot in the sophomore section. They got in and he sped out of the lot and off campus onto the open road. Veronica, bemused, sat beside him with childlike curiosity about where they were going, happy to be getting away from the intensity of campus, instantly trusting Jack.
“Where are we going?” she asked after a moment, her dark hair pushed back by the wind blowing at her with the Jeep’s top down, her intensity abating, giving way to the animated interest of a fun-loving kid.
“Does it matter?” Jack questioned.
“No, not really,” Veronica chuckled, her dark eyes drinking in the open road.
They took a drive out into the country. They did not go very far, just far enough so that you could feel the pace change. All the activity of campus passed away behind them. It was as if they had been listening too long to music played too loud and now, with the drive out into the country, that annoying music stopped. The country was slow-paced, unobtrusive, and open. No uproar-no rush, toned down, nothing but open space. It was the perfect antidote to the tumult of campus before midterms.
The sun shone brightly on the road before them; the air was clear and pleasant. Long stretches of road rolled under the jeep’s wheels in an easy, rhythmic flow. And Jack drove on, apparently without any specific destination-relaxed, just going with the road.
“Sometimes I think the dynamos out of control,” he said.
“We do seem a tormented lot,” Veronica agreed.
“Not out here, we’re not,” Jack said. “We have to get back here to the country and, somehow, we have to take it with us wherever else we go.”
As he said that he slowed down to make a turn. They had come to a ridge where a dirt road crossed their road. A vista of burgundy grass extended away from the intersection toward hills in the distance on both sides. The grass swayed in a mild breeze so the field looked like a crimson wave moving toward, then away from them from north to south, the wave broken only where the road cut into it. He turned right, off the road, onto the dirt road and headed south toward some hills. He drove three or four miles over dusty roads, like a boat sailing through a choppy red sea until he came to a second ridge. He climbed the ridge and then started slowly down the other side. As the ridge dropped down they could see, well before the hills but framed by them, a crystalline lake. The lake sat like a blue jewel in a sea of blood red grass. It was a narrow but long lake fed by a small river that entered and exited in the middle on both sides. Jack looked at the lake in awe.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” he said.
“It looks like a Cross,” Veronica commented.
“I know,” Jack said.
“Are you religious?” she asked.
“The Cross means something to me,” he said.
“What?” she asked, looking at the lake.
“Sacrifice, renewal,” he said, “and goodness.” Jack continued gazing at the lake.
“God, I love the outdoors. That’s why I like it here so much. I guess you could say this place is my church and my religion.”
“Meaning?” Veronica asked.
“Meaning