A few months ago, I walked through my office at home on my way out to my car to head off to work. I picked up my car keys and looked out the window at all the activity on my street.  A new sewer project up on my hill had brought a symphony of sound and sight to the neighborhood.  Tractors and trucks and bobcats and men in orange vests and hard hats worked from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon five days a week.  For my normally quiet neighborhood, this was quite a change.  But I liked the activity and the progress it would bring to our aging sewer line. 

On this particular day I had seen a small tractor backing up along the curb outside my house where my son, visiting from Los Angeles, had parked his Subaru SUV.
I thought it looked like the tractor got pretty close to the car;  then a few minutes later, one of the younger construction workers walking past my son's car looked down toward the driver's side fog lamp and stopped. And stared.  He even kneeled down and appeared transfixed at what he saw.

Rats!  I thought to myself.  I should have known: the tractor had hit the car after all.    I opened the door and called out to the worker,
"Is something wrong?"
He stood up quickly and, looking startled, said,
"No. I was just looking at something."

So I marched out the door to the sidewalk where the Subaru was parked.
The worker kneeled down again.  He pointed to the fog lamp. "See?" he asked  with a smile spreading across his tanned face.
"See the butterfly wing?  Look how blue it is!  I was walking down to your back yard and when I came by the car, the sun was shining on the wing and I just couldn't keep on walking.  I had to stop and stare at it.  Amazing, isn't it?"

I bent down and looked at it.  It was a dragonfly wing.  And it was indeed the most amazing blue.  Like the color of the Caribbean Sea. Like a color you'd trademark and keep all to yourself if you could. A clear, iridescent blue wing shining there on the mud-caked fog lamp like a jewel in the morning sun.

"This is a dragonfly wing,"  I said to him as I stood up. It really was extraordinary.  The sounds of tractors and the beep beep beep of trucks backing up seemed to fade into silence in the beauty of the moment.  The young man was still smiling.  And then so was I.  I  thanked him for sharing his discovery with me, and he headed down the uneven path between my neighbor's and my house.

Not all artists draw. Or paint or sketch.  Some just point out beauty where they find it, and then they pick up their shovels, put on their yellow hard hats and head off past red bougainvillea and dark green ivy-covered chain link fences and get back to digging in the dirt.