Green is the color of life, and for today I am wrapped in a quilt of it on grass and fern and hanging tree boughs.

Brown comes next, it is already on the edges of the sword fern, the cedars, the flecks of wool woven in my sweaters, waiting in my bedroom drawers.

Brown is overtaking the hillsides in a mottled tussle with green. On the undersides of the large maple, the wisteria: it’s like brown is the true nature of green, the next layer down.

It is not a foreign thing or an invader. It’s maybe just the absence of what came before.

Let me lay in the sun so that I can turn brown, the color of a deep roux. A peanut butter brown, the desert brown that stretches as far as the eye can see.

The sun gives us the green of life to start, the brown of endurance to keep going. It could be like the signs of our own aging, it comes on slowly then all at once.

Categories: poetry, writing

Tags: aging, prose