For just moments at sunrise and sunset, late summer light sets fire to the earth and sea; the view melts into monochrome.
Alchemy turns everything to variegated gold.
Tone blends into tone, a subdued rainbow’s edge. Light catches creatures and creations we might easily have missed. Heaven touches down within our reach.
Sometimes gold is everlasting and sometimes it touches down to earth and then disappears into darkness.
Sunsets lately have featured bursts of blinding gold that quickly dissipate to orange and into black. I often watch them while touching the unending smooth circle of Jim’s gold wedding band.
Jim and I lived in many homes together, from our first 500-square foot Boston apartment to the home where we raised four children and tried mightily to moderate the extremely destructive exuberance of one of our beagles.
Every place we lived was known in marital shorthand as “the nest.”
“Nice nest,” I told him on our first night in the old home he always knew he wanted, looking through the thick glass windows towards an October sunset as it washed over gold maple leaves which wavered in the wind and formed a lace-like overlay on our view of the church across the town green.
Jim grinned.
When our first daughter was born, we took her to a conference in California. While we were there we visited Jim’s cousin Chris (who memorably remarked upon how “well-marbled” our baby was) and his parents, Uncle Donald and Aunt Ruth.
Uncle Donald touched the aforementioned plump pink skin of this beautiful bare-footed newborn as Jim propped her up on his knee in the California sun.
“These are the golden years,” Uncle Donald said to us with a smile suffused with memories of his children as babies. Continue reading ““Nothing Gold Can Stay””
Lately, as I have pondered assorted metal hues, my far-away daughter has been taking photographs steeped in gold.
Just as Fields of Gold has a lovely version sung in a female voice; Yeats’ Song of Wandering Aengus (which is in fact a poem) has been given a female voice.
When I was a high school senior, I enlisted the help of many friends in painting a mural–which somehow has not faded–high up in the school’s entryway. It has bright rainbow colors and is segmented (in a very then-mod way) with scenes from nature and snippets of favorite quotes.
I notice now that, in keeping with my personality–and nicely dovetailing with the prior decade’s outsized colors and cartoon shapes–my painting style was one of clear, bright-line distinctions among colors, not the light and shading and nuance of my daughters’ paintings and photographs. Continue reading “Gold and Silver Apples”
Love in the Spaces 