January 9: Oranges

Some days I just find myself craving a particular color. This morning I was drawn to orange--orange undershirt, some clementines with my cereal for breakfast, orange gloves as I headed out to soak up some sunlight. The need was stimulated, I'm sure, by my constant need for more warmth this time of year, as well as the mood boost the color offers when contrasted with the pale dirty snow out my window. It's a color that catches and embodies light, connoting Florida citrus and sunshine. Perhaps my body craves more Vitamin C to help me shed once and for all a niggling cold, and this attraction to orange is a way of getting me to ingest some healthful fruit.

The sight of tulips in my window near the fruit bowl helped satisfy my longing for this color, albeit not as tangibly as those clementines, which I devoured. 

And I've been fixating on a section of our prayer flag garland that sports five tangerine-colored pennants in a row, the only repetition in a string of 48. If I could translate those symbols, perhaps there's something I need to be learning there...

Fruit and flowers glow

in kitchen's weak, winter light.

Outside, dirty snow.

November 9: Clementines

Mondays can sometimes be the hardest day of the week. There's catching up on e-mail accumulated over the weekend, staff meetings, and then the realization of all that needs to be accomplished in the five days ahead. Especially when the weather is as unseasonably warm as it was today, and all I wanted to do was get out on a trail somewhere to look for sparrows among the dead leaves and weeds.

But small pleasures can be found. The perfectionist workaholic in me appreciates the satisfaction of completing a day's tasks well and making a good start on the work week. And there are the day-long distractions of the titmice at my feeder, scolding each other with more aggressive vigor than one would expect in such tiny birds. Or the lingering citrus fragrance of fresh-peeled clementines that transports me from a dim office on a November afternoon to somewhere tropical and exotic...

Blue bowl, orange fruit.
Sweet clementines for my lunch--
perfumed taste of Spain.