Vigor and Decay

Brown is the color of the days. We, at such an angle to the sun, give up our growing season and must tilt toward the melancholy color of mud.

While finger-painting, brown might be the first color you make by mistake. In your enthusiasm, you blended all the colors on the pallet and ended up with nothing remarkable. In fact, it looks like excrement.

Brown may not be a vibrant color, but it is generally a warm one. All living things are, at some point, brown. The goldfinch, as if reduced to rags, just dingy fluff where brightness had been.

A large flock spends much of its day feeding between the two fields. I am familiar with their sound and flight pattern; their muted guise is but better camouflage. They depart one plot of desiccated wildflowers and bound toward the strip of sunflowers, they vanish in the crosshatched sea of brown stalks. In the flowers’ annual demise are seeds, brown pods, for birds to eat, and thereby spread the flowers. What a simple equation.

Sepia, burnt umber: The paints depict both vigor and decay.

Brown is recognized, symbolically, to espouse a connection to the earth, a grounding color — the pun is inevitable, and the hues infinite.

For much of the year, the Long Pond Greenbelt, is more adequately described as the brown belt. We call it green because the strip of wilderness has been left alone, spared the shovel and the disturbance of outright development. But its muck shorelines and its dead or dormant oaks impress upon the hiker dual visions of both vigor and decay.

As the water in these ancient kettleholes has so drastically receded, we might wonder where the hole is. Some blame curbing and cuts, obstruction and extraction. Others say that leaving Sagg Pond open to the ocean all season set up a series of times when subsequent freshwater was being drawn out. The result, maybe the inevitable result, made only more quick by our meddling.

Kettleholes like these are the result of an ice age — they are ancient and vanishing, sometimes seasonally, sometimes “forever.” But today, due to the low water, mudflats are visible, as are the gentle rivulets of groundwater that seep to the surface.

And a group of snipe, generally solitary and secretive birds, probe the mud in a deliberate and unhurried manner. The birds are patterned but entirely brown. Their beaks, almost incongruously long, methodically drill for invisible morsels — brown things, no doubt, sustenance from the muck.