Clouds scudded through the hills to the east. A dearth of ragged pollen. Scant plash of rain. It was too dry for April and too hot. May was lime green; new leaves lush with promise. In June, I carried my yellow satin parasol on walks through the emerald hills, seeking out monarchs fluttering their orange and black wings in wild milkweed patches. I once followed them to dusty Mexico.
July is when I kissed my blooming peonies. I’ve eighteen bushes, with each bush flouncing three to twenty blooms. On hot days the blossoms blasted out their scent from bowls of color: citrine, cream tinged with pink, salmon, cool white, deep crimson. Early morning I would wander out barefoot in the dew to lay my cheek against their soft satin blossoms. When the petals fell, I collected and confettied them on the porch, even though they soon turned brown underfoot. Anything to keep them with me, just like the Chinese planters who’ve cultivated peonies for 1500 years.
Today I’m breeding a borderline depression; just not feeling robust, and wish I had some of that ancient Chinese tea from a peony root. I’m finding it difficult to sleep or else sleep too much, which leads to my robustlessness. Understandable if it were March, which my yoga teacher called the kapha season – early spring, the brown time ‒ a combination of water and earth. We call it mud season in Vermont (my dirt road becomes impassable, the ruts deeper than my car wheels). Now it’s winter ‒ the white time with blue shadows. Not exactly robust colors.
Luckily, as I write this, sun is blasting through my window, warming my bones. I’m grateful for the yellow bath, although yellow’s history is brutal, as is the history of most colors. Indian Yellow, preferred by many painters in antiquity, came from starving cows. The Bengalese cattle were fed on a diet solely of mango leaves, tingeing their urine that prized color. Van Gogh is famous for his luscious use of yellow in the swirling constellations of Starry Night, the walls of The Yellow House, and his many Sunflower paintings. He exuberantly flung his paint, relishing the hot, vibrant hues in haystacks and wheat fields. Had the toxic substance been the cause of his mental instability, as he often wet the paint brushes in his mouth?
Naples yellow, luminous lemon, Aureolin hue, ochre. Gamage yellow of goldfinch wings. Kings yellow of the Golden Pheasant. Straw yellow of polar bear. Wine yellow of the silk moth. Sulphur yellow of a dragonfly. Saffron yellow of the antlers of a crocus flower. Yellow jasmine, tulip, primrose, dandelion, daffodil. Banana, lemon. Topaz, jasper. The Yellow Rose of Texas. Yellow, hot as mustard. Monet’s dining room in Giverny, France, is drenched in yellow: chairs, table, walls. Thinking about yellow in January is bittersweet.
Disease was once treated according to its color. Jaundice remedies were yellow turnips, gold coins, saffron, yellow spiders rolled in butter, gold beads. If my disease is lethargy, then I should be treating it with mud, of which I could make plenty if it were spring. But it’s winter, and I miss ochre sand dunes and the desert’s swollen silence, so I gorge myself on Paul Bowles’ hot, mystical Morocco and Camus’ dusty Algeria, its luminous sea.
In winter, old memories surface. Palmyra, where I climbed the 2000-year-old stone wall of the Temple of Bel, burnished sienna under a hot white sun, now rubble from ISIS bombs. The beach in the little town of Finike, Turkey, where an elaborately carved, discarded sarcophagus - likely Roman - washed up on the incoming tide. It’s probably in a glass case now in the British Museum. On that glittering gold beach littered a cargo-load of discarded oranges.
The sweet citrus of those oranges. The tang of a tangerine. The softer hues of apricot and peach. Marigolds, and the streak of the Kingfisher eye. The lower wings of the Tiger Moth. The neck ruff of the Golden Pheasant and the body of a Warty Newt. The famous Seville oranges, too bitter for marmalade, must be bought only in the few short weeks of January, though you can’t find them in Vermont.
I miss the steep climb to a hidden cave in Cappadocia, the ceiling and walls covered with indigo and carnelian figures. The deep hole in the floor where I lowered my companion down by frayed rope into inky black darkness, where he found an intact skull with a protruding forehead the color of turmeric, beautifully preserved. Now there is a gaudy hotel with stiff fees and bored guides who will keep you out of the cave. I slept with Bedouins in the rose-colored grottoes of Petra before they were relocated to dirty-white cement block developments ‒ Nabataean Bedouins, who had lived in Petra since the first century, B.C. Now Petra also has a large hotel, entrance fees, and reams of noisy tourists.
I didn’t know then how quickly it could change.
Time erases. Time returns. Time folds in on itself and the places I miss don’t exist. In all seasons, color remains.
