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.
Love in the Spaces 