Portland Grain Elevator

Beyond a field of blue, yellow, red, and white flowers is a message. You can't read it. People have painted over it, blacked it out. They did it in a hurry, you can tell. What used to be a message is framed by a rectangle open to the heavens above. It's a four-starred incomplete rectangle. The message is on a building across the river from downtown Portland, a building that stores the harvest of ... of what? That's the reason you'd like to know what used to be written there, a message no longer decipherable. Once upon a time it stored grain, that's for sure, but now its contents are obscure. Does it now store genetically engineered food of the gods, calories that perhaps could make you immortal? One of the main points of buildings is to be clear--what it is, who built it and why, what it stands for, like the solidity of old banks said, "We are reliable." But here is no transparency. The building is just by the river, near the Interstate, where waves of cars roll on by.