CURTAIN CALL

By MICHAEL PERKINS

ALL OF THE COLORS OF CHRISTMAS SEEM TO BE THOSE that we have artificially assigned to the season. The brilliant reds, greens and golds that flirt and twinkle around the holidays are not nature’s colors, for, like most of life, the hues of the natural world go into hibernation during the winter. We stage bright banners and gay wrappings in front of what is, basically, a hushed palette, greens muted to browns, reds faded to russet, gold tamed to beige.

The onset of winter is made even harder to bear since it immediately follows the most extravagant explosion of color in the entire calendar. Sprays of florescent tones are bittersweet, even in their glory, as they are the explosion that foretells death for the very things that give the season its splendor. Because of this, at least at a photographer, I am always reluctant to let autumn go. It’s like one last embrace from your sweetheart before you are shuttled off to war.

And so, before snow drops its eerie mantle of silence upon yet another year, a hat tip to the great Robert Frost, as his pen and my camera lift one more glass to the brightness….

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.