Prickly Purple Beauty

Perhaps the prickly purple beauty of thistle flower tints the summer seaside with lavender crowns. She feels at home here in these gilded hills, sparkling in her element as an amethyst jewel – each showy filigree orb perched on a silvery stem hemmed with the rich, royal green spiked collar of her imperial costume.

Maybe she is a no more than a troublesome weed, you say. With her stubborn, invasive root system and impenetrable armor of sharp thorns she is not easy to remove. Though she may choke your garden, come first and visit her on this secluded seaside trail, and see her as I see her. Greet her with the same sweet morning song of sunshine that opens your own soft violet eyes. Watch how industrious bees and idle butterflies alike are drawn to drink her dew. 

orange of

Perhaps the eerie, glowing orange of today's midday sun summons the midnight panic of hands reaching for family pets, photographs, passwords and passports with only minutes to spare. We have no desire to eat or speak as long as the soot of last night's hungry, weary witching hour infuses this peachy air – an air charged with particles too dangerous to breathe in yet impossible to flee – microscopic motes of heartbreak clinging to our cars, mailboxes, and entering our bloodstreams, scattering like loose petals in a fluttering avalanche of whirl and whim.

Maybe the grey that remains of what is lost kneels before each family. Twists of molten glass, shards of chipped and blackened plates, a child’s toy somehow untouched, a scorched coffee cup. Meanwhile this dusty citrus sheen of sunlight continues to illuminate the black skeletons of trees and florescent orange cones marking evacuated neighborhoods, the pumpkin-orange vests of volunteers combing the debris for human remains, a color so bright no one can bear to look at it for long.

  

The kind of red

Perhaps it is the kind of red that tastes of late-September strawberries ripening under their dark-haired leaves, the sweetness of nature’s last hurrah sugaring the pink edge of my tongue – or the red over-ripe scent of forgotten apples left on the tree too long; a heavy, somber fragrance souring the air that follows my footsteps on this early morning walk.

Or maybe it is the kind of red that belongs to police lights swiveling into the dimly lit kitchens of neighbors coaxing their children to finish their breakfasts and get ready for school. The deafening shriek of sirens that filled my ears the morning you lost your son. I remember tugging at my own son to get dressed, brush his hair, zip his jacket, and put on his shoes as we ventured out into the cold red sunrise that hurt my eyes already red and wet from crying and I kissed him goodbye at the door of his kindergarten classroom.