These pieces were written in a Writing Circle on Saturday, October 28 — during a 10-minute warm-up period
For inspiration, we chose color swatches from different paint companies. Some pseudonyms have been chosen.
Butter cream frosting, so good — so bad! Please do not color it blue, unless just a flower on the cake. Make it, instead, a yellow that falls between corn silk and honey-gold. That would be best. After all, I'm not marrying, it is not my birthday, and I am not being feted upon retirement. Make this frosting for a humble cake! You do not need to know that I will eat it secretly, alone in my home, while I watch guilty-pleasure TV.
- Buttercup Buttercup
Hail a yellow cab because the group left in a car without me, for a Big Red / Big Apple event, and I'm snagged by what comforts me, the pain and loss of a woman I love. Snagged in gratitude and anger, sunshine and rage, wanting justice and healing. Intimidated by another story, the narrative of success and failure. I hold both — they seem to be at odds with each other. Power and vulnerability. Will the struggle ever end? Does it have to?
- Cricket Stone
"Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." Orange, red, and yellow. Blood and sunshine. Dying, but not dead. Fading, but not gone. Like the passing of years for a Hollywood starlet. Moving into new life stages, transitions. Silence to talking. Talking to silence. Always changing. And the mischievous faces on Jack O'Lanterns — smiling at the darkness. Like little Buddhas, their laugh is enlightenment.
- JLL
Autumn moon
rattling your gold like a pirate in the sky
stealing my heart from summer's love
holding me hostage to sail with you through a colder milky way
and fill a spinnaker with afterglow to drift me into winter
- Kimberly Zajac
Now the days are becoming shorter and darker and I make an effort to focus on things I like to see and do — buying season tickets to the theatre, making apple butter, planning for Thanksgiving, raking leaves — so as not to become enveloped in a dark, cold cloud. The mist that rises from snow in winter is so different than the steam from a scented bath, or the aerated water that floats above a hot tub. In the evening I look across the city at dark shadowy hills, and riding above them like a stream of ribbons, there is yellow and cream, aqua and violet — brightened by a hidden sunset.
- Liz Ashford
When he was away one spring break I painted my son's room — in the old house — orange. So cheerful, rich, and warmed by the afternoon sun. Will I ever have an orange room again?
- Sheila Dean
This morning, drinking a glass of Emergen-C Super Orange, with the fizzy scent of 100 oranges traveling right up my nose, I am transported out of a chilly October day and plunked down into a long-ago August. It is city-hot and all the kids on my block are lined up at the Good Humor Truck. Somehow it happens that I end up with a Creamsicle Pop. Orange ice wrapped around vanilla ice cream. Wow. Everything changes for me on this day. I will never go back to vanilla Dixie cups. Dixie cups are for babies. I'm a big girl now. 10 years old. I can manage a Creamsicle. Long lingering licks of deliciousness. And there is a bit of danger, too. A chunk of Creamsicle can slither down my hand and wind up on the sidewalk. But that doesn't happen. No mishaps, no tears. It's a miracle.
- Zee Zahava
