One Color Goes A Long Way

I’ve still not seen Orange is the New Black, and it probably would take a whole column just to digest the meaning of that title, let alone the impact of the show. But what I know for sure is that, every time autumn settles in, I’m conscious of how much just one color can express, all along the continuum between life and death.

Nature does this alone, very nicely. Toss in some memories, and the path lights up even more, as if illuminated by those paper bags that glow with candles inside.

Behind our pond, there’s just enough orange in the trees now to complement the yellows and greens, without overpowering them. It’s the combination of colors that’s most satisfying, putting up a palette in the sky.

Wherever pumpkins are sold, on the other hand, there is no daintiness or subtlety. The almost unmitigated (what’s with the creamy white ones, a new trend?) orange comes at you like a punch. They’re plump and expectant– yet to be chosen, yet to be sliced up and made spooky. And yet, just glancing at them sends your mind towards the end result of jack-o-lanterns: they’ll shrivel or maybe break into pieces, come November. Enough falls will do this.

For me, there’s a whole other orange — a pebbly upholstered kind– that burns brightly in my October mind.

Oddly enough, both of my parents died in the same house on the same calendar date, Oct. 6^th, fourteen years apart. Following each death, my brothers and I plus spouses and kids and other long-time friends crowded into the living room for a kind of memorial service, although the word “service” might be a bit of an exaggeration. My husband gently presided, set the tone, inviting people to speak about Hank, then, when we re-convened, about Barbara.

Our house was simple, sitting close to the ground, with no upstairs or downstairs. In fact, it was pre-fabricated. As my mother used to say, proudly, to anyone who wondered, “It all came on one truck!” The pebbles on the driveway crunched as we approached; the same pine trees loomed overhead; the low-lying shed melted just a little more each year into the earth out back.

Where else would we go with our memories, but the living room that had been like a beating heart for all of us? Oddly, both of the gatherings have merged in my mind through the years since they happened, as if they were really one and the same, even though during those fourteen years I added two more children to the original baby in arms, moved twice, changed jobs, approached 50.

The prime seats were where they always had been, for countless evenings with the pouring of sherry, the passing of cheese and crackers, the re-counting of adventures, and the crackling of the fire. Once again, we sat on the built-in orange couches making a right angle, with bookcases above and storage drawers beneath. Here is my good friend Jacquie, and next to her a picture of my mother as a new bride, leaning on a hoe in a Virginia cornfield.

It’s a kind of a muted orange, but an orange nonetheless. Nowadays, most people would probably think the couch looks ridiculous— stiff more than comfy, nothing you’d want to take a nap on, very 1950s. I never did hear how it was chosen in the first place. But these apricot rectangles will forever remain joined in my mind to my long-wedded parents, and to October.