Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets, --
Prodigal of blue,
Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover’s words.
--Emily Dickinson,
American Poet, d. 1886
With apologies to Miss Dickinson, I have to respectfully disagree. The hill is absolutely awash in yellow—from the tiny honey locust leaves to the twining bittersweet, from the wide witch hazel to the towering tulip tree. With the lack of rain, yellow may be the only splash of color we get this year; many of the shrubs that produce more sought-after fall foliage in shades of burgundy, cinnabar, and scarlet, like the viburnums and dogwoods, are looking too tired and dry to put forth much in the way of showy hues. Still, we’ll take what we can get, and against an azure autumn sky, even workaday yellow is a perfect complement.
With the exception of D’s tomatoes, it wasn’t a wonderful year for the garden. The growing season started off great—lots of snowmelt meant the ground was moist and friable. But a heat wave in April brought the daffodils and tulips to their knees in a matter of days, and put the whole season about two weeks ahead of where it normally lies. Mid-summer, rainfall simply stopped—with just a few exceptions, we’ve not had a soaking, regenerative rain in months.
Like many of our neighbors, we’ve limped by using our sprinklers, hoses, and watering cans. But I’m actually relieved to see the leaves turning yellow and floating to the ground—even with the hand-watering, the plants are exhausted, ready for dormancy. As am I. While I wouldn’t wish a winter like our last one on anyone, the garden could use another year with ample snowfall and a protective blanket of white to insulate the ground. But, like everything connected to the garden, we’ll just have to wait and see; nature, as we know, exercises her will independently of man’s desires.
So, for now, we’ll take our pleasure in the somewhat ho-hum yellow leaves and ignore the papery brown ones as we walk along the garden paths after work and on the weekends. After all, yellow is the color of enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition—hence the saffron robes of many monks. Corazon Aquino adopted yellow as a potent populist symbol during her struggles to lead the Philippine people against the Marcos dictatorship. And yellow ribbons have symbolized our prayers for the safe return of American armed forces for decades, thanks to Tony Orlando.
Wisdom, courage, hope, faithfulness—that’s a lot for one color to live up to. And yet, it’s easy to understand why Cory Aquino, among so many others, named yellow as her favorite: it reminds us of the sun, warming us, and bringing cheer into the most blustery day. Assigning attributes to colors is certainly nothing new. We’ve been celebrating red-letter days since the Middle Ages, when monks used red ink for holy days when transcribing calendar rubrics for monasteries and churches. We feel blue, or sometimes green with envy. When things really don’t swing our way, our mood is black. Of course, we can be in the pink, too, thankfully.
As a chill starts to creep back into the air of these early fall days, we’ll revel in the yellow swatches that the trees send earthward on invisible breezes. It’s true that, despite its abundance this year, yellow doesn’t hold the promise that the pinks and lavenders of spring do. The ephemeral blossoms of crocuses and daffodils are heralds of warm weather and balmy, lazy weekends spent out-of-doors, while the golden blazes of the maples and hawthorns are the season’s final hurrah before the monochrome winter sets in.
All the more reason, then, to enjoy the yellow whilst it lasts. For soon, nature won’t be spending yellow, or any other color, “like a woman.” In fact, in no time at all, she’ll be hording all her colors like Ebenezer Scrooge hording his shillings. And in those drab months, deep in the winter, we’ll look back and be thankful for the yellow that now crowns the hill we call home.
No comments:
Post a Comment