🌻 Yellow

the color of July

I’ve never been a yellow person. You won’t find me wearing a yellow dress or decorating my living room in canary yellow. Yellow is too loud, a “please, look at me” color. Yellow is an odd word, too.

I remember asking my mother how to spell it. She said, “Y—” and I chirped back, “for a school project.” She repeated, frustrated, “Y,” and I answered her again. She finally told me to look it up in the dictionary, which I never understood. How can you look a word up in the dictionary if you don’t know how to spell it?

But if you do look up the word, you will see that yellow means "bright," "gleaming," and "to cry out," and that it has evolved over thousands of years across multiple languages.

There are many things in my neighborhood this month crying out to be seen, all different hues of yellow, especially the Cloudless Sulphur butterfly. They flit alongside me on my walks, as if pointing the way to happiness. “Just follow this path, and you will know the secret to everlasting joy,” they seem to say.

Female Cloudless Sulfur butterfly | photo by Mary Tase

Here is one on my fence. She looks a little worn out, as if her happiness were all used up. See the spots and smudges scattered across her wings? The males don’t have those markings. Instead, they look like lemon drops, bobbing through the air in search of the next female.

Maybe she’s tired after laying her eggs, having mated only once, maybe twice, in her brief two-to-four-week life. Here in South Texas, spared the long migration and winter pause, she’s on the fast track of life, from wing to wing, flower to flower, life to life.

I feel as if I, too, am on the fast track of life. I swear I was just a mere twenty-something sprinting down to Florida for spring break, dancing to “Brick House” under the moon. I won’t share what else happened during those hot Fort Lauderdale beach days, but it’s true: college holds some of the best, most carefree days of my life.

“We Are Family,” and I had all my sisters with me. I’m the third from the right.

So maybe I do like yellow after all. What’s more beautiful than a field bursting with yellow sunflowers that even Vincent Van Gogh couldn’t help painting?

Somewhere between those sunflowers and the butterflies on my fence, yellow has come to mean attention, joy, and the brief, dazzling moments that make the presence of now so meaningful.

Maybe I’ll pay more attention to the color yellow this month, which won’t be too difficult. At least I now know how to spell it and what it means to me.

“The sun dazzles me and goes to my head, a sun, a light that I can only call yellow, sulphur yellow, lemon yellow, golden yellow. How lovely yellow is!"

— Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother, Theo van Gogh,
while Vincent was living in Arles, France, 1888