Orange, Yellow, and Deep Blue Red

Written with the prompts:  in the autumn of life, hitch a ride home, how would she know to stop, orange, yellow, and deep blue red, the ocean waved, my home, difficult to resist, unspoken, in test after test, magical thinking, it looked something like this, cool as a cucumber, people come and people go, race of his lifetime, belonging or be longing

The Municipal Utility District was giving away trees, saplings actually, and I chose a Valley Maple.  They told me in fall its leaves would turn a flaming orange and I liked that, thinking it would match my long tresses.  But in the autumn of my life, California was beset with change.  Warm summer weather lingered and the leaves of the maple wouldn’t turn.  In October they were still green, a dull embarrassed chartreuse spotted with brown, like liver spots on my aging hands.  

In late November we had a cold snap one night and in the morning every leaf was bright yellow like a flock of canaries.  I was mesmerized.  But the next day, every last leaf had fallen to the ground and my lawn was a boggy soggy mess.  I sought escape.

It is difficult to resist when tule fog descends on the valley, and the ocean is waving at you, calling across the coastal range.  Come home, Monarch Butterfly.  The sky here is rich blue at noon and red at 5 PM.  Everything is vital, every cell is alive.  Hitch a ride home and we will sit atop the cliff, drinking egg nog and eating Christmas cookies.  We will watch the Pacific, cool as a cucumber, not crashing, merely creeping, inch by inch up the sand, running the race of her lifetime.  How will she know when to stop? I wonder, but it is a rhetorical question.  I know she will never stop, because people come and people go, and she won’t be satisfied until she has lived as every one of them.  

Oh, she tells me, that’s magical thinking.  I will tire long before that happens.

There is something unspoken, a deep understanding between the maple tree and the ocean.  In test after test, no conclusion was reached, but it looked something like this:  water and roots reaching toward each other, each longing and belonging together.

Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash