p e n c h a n t

Color is everywhere. You can walk in it, breathe it in.

photo by Troy Howell

You know that book in which the only place where the word anomaly appears is the index, on page 362? It reads: anomaly, 362.

My blog entry for this week, “Hare today…”, is on my agent’s blog, Crowe’s Nest. If you came here from there, please look around. If not, you can get there from here.

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Once a year about this time a pink cloud grows and grows and hovers above our front yard.
It affects the light that comes in the windows, the feel of the air. It’s telling the creatures, of course, who love the scent and the sweet, “Come propagate me.” They do, lustily. Then the winds come and we have pink rain. After that, by summer, we have cherries. Then come the birds and squirrels.

And so it goes, year after year.

photo © 2009 by Troy Howell

and a crimson of cardinals burdens the birdfeeder, five crows—one with a hiccup
that follows its every caw—come harassing, the cat who wanted out wants in again,
both wood stoves, upstairs and down, are coughing and choking, and the ink in my
pen’s gone cold.

artwork is charcoal—the real stuff, right from the hearth—on charcoal paper

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One reason I like this time of year is that nature drops us little reminders that drab is not the only color. Where I live in the Eastern United States, the chlorophyll is gone, the light is low, snow comes. It’s against the snow you notice them most, those festive bright-colored spots: a cardinal, holly berries, rose hips. The red-breasted grosbeak is a sight, displaying a shocking splash of blood on its pure white chest.

As the leaves dropped off our maple tree, we wondered what the delicate tendrils were that lingered, circling the trunk, yellow-leaved with small orange pods. The leaves soon fell, the pods opened, red berries remained. “The bittersweet!” my wife exclaimed. She had planted one in an outdoor urn four years ago, and uprooted it when it did not take. Perhaps the urn was too confining. She tossed it down the hillside, to return it to the earth.

It’s thriving now.

William Morris—writer, designer, craftsman, printer, painter, visionary in Victorian times—once told a client he would paint her room the blue of a starling’s egg. How often do we consider the source of a color, a natural representation of it, rather than a commercial version or swatch? You must study nature to do so.

Here then, is bittersweet-berry red, and its companion color, bittersweet-berry-leaf orange.