For the Love of Orange

Paul Gauguin, Still life with Oranges, 1881

Something odd happened to me in late 2017: I became enamored with the color orange.

That fall, I’d met someone, and orange was appearing everywhere, like some kind of hallucinatory sign. It sped by on the side of a truck, flowers in the park, the color of his surfboard. It appeared in past purchases: an orange skirt I bought in the spring, imagining it billowing in the wind, a tangerine wristlet made of pebbled leather. It appeared in poems I wanted to read aloud: Frank O’Hara’s lover in an orange shirt; Ada Limón’s ripening persimmons. I wanted to know what it meant, that I was seeing this color as if for the first time, and why it was suddenly all around me.

When I was in high school, in spring—sun out, the world thawing—my friends and I would walk from our campus down to the wetlands, a startling bit of wilderness in the middle of Beaverton, Oregon. There was a pond, and a dock that led out onto it, where you could sit in skinny jeans and kick your legs out over the water. On bright and windless days, the landscape on the other side of the pond was reflected in its surface as perfectly as in a mirror. I loved to sit on the dock and look at the trees dancing on the water, their colored foliage,