SORT OF ORANGE

This will be short (or was meant to be short); just long enough ( too long) to clear out the sunny remains of a week (a long week.). Not too many actual memories, just the moods, and the colors.

I’ve been north. I’m back south again. Long drive, back and forth, up and down, bridges and mountains and white-knuckled (speaking of color) moments racing along the Interstate among trucks and other steel rapters, some obviously under the control of people who loosely value their own and other people’s lives.

While driving, I got to have my nerves chewed upon by another little beast that popped up on my dashboard, i.e., a warning light that my coolant was low. A car has to get cooled.

This introduced me to the kindness of strangers at a big, busy Pilot truck stop plaza in Virginia where I just happened to stop, sensing an emergency, and where a young clerk offered to fill my coolant reservoir (which was down to the minimum) with some of her own coolant from a container she kept in her jeep.

“What color is it?” she asked (meaning the coolant), trying to determine if she had a right kind for my car.

“Sort of orange,” I said.

“I’ve got some,” she said. She came out to my car and filled the clear plastic orb of a reservoir for free, helped out by a male manager who did the actual pouring under the hood. I was so relieved. They wouldn’t take any money, just wished me a safe trip to Florida. I fueled up and moved on. Yes, happier, and believing again in humanity.

I’m going to write their bosses, the local Chamber of Commerce, everybody I can think of. I’ll tell them about the wonderful young folks who helped me. Too bad I got neither of their names. I just see them, though dressed darkly, as bright colors. Smiles and good wishes.

Had I stopped at the previous exit, or waited until the next one, would my circumstances have been so blessedly altered? The odds would have been uncertain, 50-50 at best — or, to name a color, gray. Color the encounter at Pilot in Toms Brook, Virginia as bright gold, several shades above orange, and precious. (And if there’s an actual Tom’s Brook, I hope it’s silver clear in an age of murky waters.)

Speaking (again) of color — colors that are sort of orange or sort of bright….My whole trip now, in some manner (almost suggesting a state of synesthesia), lives in memory as colors. As does all of life, in some sense, right?

That’s how I see the seasons, too — as do many. As colors. White for winter, of course, but also bare earth tones with gray skies. All the colors of spring flowers for Spring. Brown and gold for fall….(the leaves, you know), it makes sense to our senses which store such tones in memory. It’s inescapable, this “colors of the day” Judy Collins thing. Even for the color blind, inner colors must draw inside the lines of the bare white outlines in the blank pages of our mental and emotional coloring books.

But, I guess I’m getting colorfully carried away — but, frankly, feeling sort of blue this Florida Sunday afternoon. Dark blue. Couldn’t tell you why except in a thousand gray, imprecise words. So, never mind….

But there was a white external moment recently…. memorable…..

I ran into a little snow in Vermont, just a squall. But as the road covered over, leaving only tire tracks in whiteness, I got nervous. There were steep hills ahead. Were these going to be my driving conditions all the way to my next stop, which was a friend’s house, many miles off, in Rotterdam Junction, New York? White felt like black, or whatever color fear is. Night for day.

But the snow stopped. A plow truck came out. The sky afterwards was a swirling, misty mix of gray, white and blue. The journey continued, and, ultimately, all I had left, besides occasionally the radio and a view of the Green Mountains, was my green thoughts turning a rich deep, melancholy undefinable shade, as if they were absorting the late fall landscape in transition. Sort of orange. (Fear can be that color too, if orange fluid is running low and your car might overheat, and your inner emotional fluid is running low as well.)

On the bright side up there in Vermont, I had stopped being worried long enough to remember how snow’s whiteness transforms trees. It was beautiful. The white wouldn’t last, not this time. But it was lovely. It was so white. Pure white on the branches for a beatific moment.

I wrote here recently of longing for an autumn festival in a small town in Vermont. And here I was, passing through small towns in Vermont — and with no time to stop, really. And, after all, the OctoberFests were over. November was coming. November is darkening brown, deepening gold, the color of downed leaves, ready for burning, or those Thanksgiving greetings, of which I intend to mail a few this year. I love November, and I love Thanksgiving. I was born the day before Thanksgiving. I wish, as I think I’ve already said somewhere, that it was not so quickly buried under Black Friday.

My nothern memories — I cling to them, even as complex as they are….

After the Christmas lights (mostly red and green –and white and occasionally blue ond gold) vanish, the grime and the grim skies and salt-streaked windshields frigid moments holding cold steel in gloves under harsh gas station lighting, filthy snowbanks sealing souls in place for the long march toward March, then April, then Spring….Winter. …

But it’s life, this alternating palette of colors. You have to love it. There has to be a winter.

Back to Vermont, to that Vermont driving moment… as somber but bittersweet as the lingering Vermont foliage, dulled down from bright reds and golds to russett, no less beautiful, and perfect for my mood during that driving moment. October was passing. Another October. (I once did a TV essay on September. What color is September? Let me think about that.)

So now, November is here. Enough. Time to pull this half-baked loaf out of the oven. Time for that Coda that ends these rambling Sunday seasonal ruminations.

But I’ll add…

I seem to write a great deal about the seasons here; too much, perhaps. But then, in Florida, it is your mood rather than the perpetually green sub-tropical landscape (at least in South Florida) that more than anything marks the seasons, and the solar cycles and the subtle turning of the earth, the earlier sunsets, the longer, darker mornings, the Gulf, when you are fortunate enough to glimpse it, a perpetual blue-green.

But driving in Vermont, I could tell November was coming. And when the trees are bare up north, there are shadows, long, sinewy shadows across lawns and walls and roads. November shadows. And it is the month on the Christian calendar when we remember the dead. Our thoughts are draped fondly — in black.

There might even be another entry here called, “November Shadows.”

But for now, I’ll end just recalling the mood that was…sort of orange.