Arctic Bloom Earrings Nostalgia Just color held in tension

Just color held in tension by black lines

You don't see it so much as feel it: that brief

A slim barrette catching the light at the nape of the neck

when everything bronze and gold catches whatever glow is left and holds it

as though someone cupped a handful of late-summer blooms just as the light was going and pressed them into something permanent

Arctic Bloom Earrings Nostalgia Just color held in tensionWalk far enough north and the color drains out of everything sky, stone, soil, all of it rendered in white and silver and the palest possible blue. And then something happens. A crocus pushes through frozen ground. A lichen blooms across granite in a shock of cold violet. Life doesn't wait for warmth. It finds color in the inhospitable, beauty in the austere, and it announces itself against the blank canvas of winter as if to say: I was always here.