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THIS FIELD COULD BE ANY baseball field in any Midwest town, but it's not. At this field, there's a certain slant of light in the early evening as the wind stills and the humid August air begins to cool. In the heat of the afternoon, sweat slides from my forehead and burns my eyes; I'd rather take my young son to the field in the evening, when the sun—magnified and orange—balances on the tips of the pines at the west end of the outfield.

I stare at the abandoned field I love: weathered wooden posts hold up an old backstop made of chicken wire; a few vines curl upward from its base. Faded wooden signs advertising Woolworth's, Gold 'n Plump, and Dairy Dream decorate the rickety cyclone fence of the outfield. If you stand over the warped wooden home plate and call loud enough, your voice bounces back to you a second later. I shift my vision to the pines: they're silhouettes now, flat black spires that line the far edge of the field. I can almost hear my father's words from years ago: Always take time to look and see what's around you. If you just focus on the game, you might miss the beauty of the whole field.

There's so much to say about the broad, flat fields of the plains, the lush greenness. Here, you can throw your sight all the way to the horizon, and it just keeps going. I know that some day this field might erupt with the sadness of duplexes, their vinyl siding imitating an overcast sky. I know that some day a subdivision might scar this land, new roads gouging the sod. But right now this field is still a field, plain and simple and true. Right now, when the restless breezes of the day fall abruptly to their knees, the calmness becomes a sensation in itself, caressing the bare skin of your arms. And without the wind pushing on it, the ball flies true.

I throw a scuffed baseball to my son; he catches it and throws it back, the ball drawing a curved line right to me. You could keep time by a game of catch, these throws that connect hand to hand, each swing of the arm like the sweep of a pendulum. I love to watch my son snag my high, arcing throws in the web of his glove, love to see the baseball rise out of the low shadows of the trees and ignite in the light for a second before it falls back to the darkened earth.

Before we leave, my son throws one final long, looping throw. Running, I dive for the ball, and the air is so still I can feel it buoying me off the ground. I catch the ball, fall back to earth and roll, but don't get up; I lie there a few seconds, the first moisture on the grass blades tingling my neck. I lie there a few seconds, stretching the moment.

"Nice catch, Dad," my son calls. He pauses, then asks, "Dad, you OK?"

I smile but don't answer, because I know I don't need to talk, to exhale the word "Sure." I just sit up and gaze for a while into my son's eyes, watching the boy's smooth, young face ignite in the clear, bright shafts of the last slanting light. I shift my eyes and look beyond him, beyond the sharp black silhouette of the pines at the far end of the field, to the horizon, where the sun lowers itself, a bridge of red arching above it. Then my son turns, his eyes following the direction of my gaze. He stands there, staring and transfixed, as if finally understanding what his father has been seeing all these years. MM

Bill Meissner directs the creative writing program at St. Cloud State University and is the author of a book of short stories, Hitting Into the Wind. He is also working on a novel.