10/6: afternoon sunrise

One route from the parking lot to my office takes me past a lily pond. These days I'm going to school so early that the flowers aren't even open yet when I walk by. Today I was feeling under the weather so I decided to come home after my teaching was over, which meant missing a meeting and cancelling office hours. As I walked to my car, I passed the lily pond--and I had to do a double-take: two lilies were open and they were the most extraordinary color, a seemingly impossible combination of yellow and pink. How could those two colors, so different and usually distinct, blend into each other so smoothly and completely? The flowers were the luminous color of the sky at sunrise.