Photo used with permission from Joan Barrows (c)2015

Especially in deep winter, one sometimes needs at least a splash of orange.  Summer sun echoed in the orb of a buoy on a frozen sea.  A brief blinding illumination as a setting sun hits evergreens in a sea of crystalline snow.   Robins clinging to empty branches.  Papery roses imported from a much warmer climate.

Perhaps no other solitary figure has exhibited such anthropomorphic angst at the absence of orange as did Lorca’s Barren Orange Tree, robbed of its very identity:

Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.

Something in the color orange is inherently merry.  It shouts; it commands our attention. In its vividness and expressiveness it seems to be the youngest child of the color spectrum.

A dash of it goes a long way.

A horizon of orange–blazing, rusty, saturated or more subdued–reassures me that what’s beyond my sight cannot possibly be nothing but black.

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