Flanking the railroad bridge on Church Hill Road to the east and west, in the gravelly ground forsaken by all but the most opportunistic weeds, is a bumper crop of common mullein. The luminous yellow, flowering spikes of this weed rise taller than basketball players across the open lot and up the embankment to the tracks of the Housatonic Line, making the scene look sun drenched even on rainy days. The feet of these leggy interlopers are swathed in gray-green flannel socks, which on closer inspection are thick, soft, fuzzy leaves.

Because common mullein (Verbascum thapsus) is such an attractive weed, it isn’t surprising that it has been cultivated, hybridized, and distributed around the world for centuries from its native ground in Turkey and the western steppes of Asia. It has been a favorite in the borders of gardeners since the Middle Ages, and today there are 360 species of verbascum available in a full spectrum of colors. Yet to me they are most beautiful as humble weeds when they arrange themselves in airy yellow curtains across an otherwise dreary landscape.

A dead cardinal turned up on the doorstep of The Bee Monday morning. How it met its end was unclear, but there he was lying intact, vibrant and portentous — an inauspicious omen at the threshold of a new week. He was buried in the weeds across the road in a quick odd ceremony involving a snow shovel and a newspaper publisher in a bow tie.

Interested observers of nature know that the process of life on this planet, when taken as a whole, is complex, elegant, and beautiful. But when taken in particular, element by element, incident by incident, and creature by creature, nature routinely and rudely trespasses on our personal preferences. For example, I prefer flying, perching, and preening cardinals to underground dead ones. On Monday morning, I didn’t get what I wanted on that score, so the week seemed to start off on the wrong foot.

We would all be a lot happier if we had no preferences and could take the world as it comes; there would be no disappointments, just undifferentiated experience. But that’s not how things work in this dualistic world. Sensations and perceptions in all their various forms, from the cellular level to the spiritual, seem to exist to help differentiate between “good” and “bad.” The whole tilt of evolution sits on the fulcrum of preference. And members of our species in particular are notoriously preferential meddlers.