 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
OrangeNovember 08, 2007 It's hunting season on Martha's Vineyard, so I've been wearing my blaze orange vest with the reflective yellow border when I go out trail riding. This afternoon I didn't set out from the barn till quarter to four -- these days it's pitch dark by five -- and as I rode through the woods it struck me that the woods are very orange this time of year. Not orange like my vest, of course (that orange probably doesn't occur in nature, which is probably why hunters wear caps and jackets made of it); more a russety orange with more brown than yellow in it. The local oaks don't "turn" the way, say, maples do. One day their leaves are green; the next the green is mostly leached away, leaving a russet that glows yellowish in the late afternoon sun. The brighter colors are in the scrubby undergrowth -- the huckleberry leaves turn the color of pomegranates and some ferns turn a startling yellow -- and in the infrequent birch (yellow) or sassafras (a glorious melding of yellow and pink that looks, cumulatively, peach). So I was riding through this burnt orange world on my dark bay horse, trusting that no archer or small-game hunter would mistake us for tomorrow's supper and thinking about how "orange" is supposedly the only English word that has no rhyme (or so I learned in elementary school), and then trying to remember a knock-knock joke that went something like this:
Some days I think profound thoughts when I'm trail riding, but this was not one of those days. I got back to the barn after dark. Ginny said, "I'm going to give you a curfew." Her mother-in-law is dying, her husband is crewing on a boat to Bermuda, and she doesn't want me to come home with an arrow stuck in me. This is as close as Ginny comes to getting worried. She's right, I've got to set out earlier, but orange ya glad I got home safely?
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||