In which she produces a unified theory of yellow

[zeborah]

Yellow is a cheerful colour but still subject to gravity.

After the summer solstice the sun begins to sink a little lower every day in the sky. By autumn it hangs predominantly in the leaves of certain deciduous trees, and from there it falls even further so that you see the sun not in the sky (which has in the meantime turned grey with clouds) but rather scattered on the ground around the treetrunks. The rain may also wash finer particles into cracks in the pavement, or drifts lining the gutters. From this point, all the yellow leaches deep into the ground to hibernate.

When winter is over it springs up again, first as daffodils still near the ground, then in the gorse shrubs and kowhai trees. And from these flowers the honeybees collect it and fly it still further up, and once more the sun rises higher every day into the summer sky.

This is why you should never eat the yellow snow, because doing so will leave less sun for the new year.

Comments

[graydon]

That's really lovely, even considering the snow.

(You shouldn't eat yellow snow because that yellow becomes trapped in your corpse and has to struggle and struggle to get out of your coffin and return to the sun, where it is traumatized and renders the weather unseasonable.)

[zeborah]

This amendment definitely has more explanatory power than my original, as it accounts for why we presently have both yellow gingko leaves falling and yellow narcissus blooming in our gardens.

[graydon]

The ginkgo knows what hemisphere it's in, the narcissus a)doesn't and b)is a gibbering opportunist?

[zeborah]

Something like that, operating in an environment of what I heard someone refer to the other day as "global weirdening" and immediately decided to adopt. We've had a series of small floods this autumn, and since Easter some really warm weather. The rhododendrons don't know if they're coming or going.

[green_knight]

Going is better. (We have a rhododendron problem in these parts - they're spectacularly hostile to everything else alive, including ivy that goes halfway up and decides not to bother any further.

And I love your theory of yellow. It makes So. Much. Sense.

[zeborah]

That reminds my I have ivy trying to eat my garage. Seeing as how, despite narcissi, it's now practically winter and therefore for the next few months I'll only see my property in daylight during the weekends, it's probably going to have swallowed the building whole by the time I get around to doing something about it.

[brooksmoses]

Hah! I like that reasoning, yes.