Color Signals, Senescence and Seeing Red As Lobster Fra Diovolo

There’s been a black-billed cuckoo calling up the hill. Sometimes I can only hear it with my eyes closed - the colors are so loud right now. Sumac, goldenrod, aster, elderberry, apple, rose - everybody waving their flags and shouting “Goodbye!” to summer. We finally got a bit of August rain which seemed to turn up the volume on the leaving green and give the fruits the juice they needed to really go for it. 

My friend out west in a much higher, dryer place, said he’s “really come to love this time of year — senescence. Tan. Lion-colored. Serviceberries ripe. Garden steadily pouring it out.”

I hope someone could see all those nice things about me as I senesce.

Serviceberries, named so because they bloom in early spring when the ground is finally thawed enough to bury the winter-killed. Serviceberries, called Shadbush because they bloom when the shad run up the river to spawn - the dainty white flowers a polite lace draped over carnal things - a doily on a casket, white gloves at an orgy. Spawning fish and funeral services - the beginnings and ends of senescence.

I think I’m somewhere in the middle of mine. 

I cut my hair today and I tallied it’s about half gone gray, a long way from the towheaded days when it was pale as brand new cornsilk and turned green whenever I swam in a chlorinated pool. I have never been one of those girls who looks good with their hair wet. When it was still virgin summer hayfield blonde I dyed it black and blue and pink and brown - signaling. I still have a bare patch at the nape of my neck from leaving the bleach on too long, trying to get back to where I started. 

In my first house, I didn’t allow clocks or mirrors, except the tide-clock set to Duck Cove. Maybe I thought the serviceberries would tell me when it was time to come or go - the greening, golding, redding, browning of birches and maples would signal when to spring or fall. The clock and the mirror are the same thing, now, and lately I can’t seem to look away. 

My mind has been straying to wonder what I might look like with a plum flush on my cheeks or a hazelnut color in my hair, which is counter to my normally neutral, camouflage nature. What’s the point of peacocking if you’re not looking for a mate? Maybe I think I might trick death by flashing youthful signals, cheap tricks, as if death isn’t the mirror and the clock itself. Maybe the greying of my hair is depleting my body of essential pigments so I’m compelled to compensate in strange ways like putting beet juice on my lips or spending long moments absorbed in brightly colored flowers. Like taking vitamins to supplement for a pallid diet. Maybe my body knows those blazing leaves and aster blooms are calling, too, to me, “Goodbye!” and I should have a good, long drink before the place goes pale and quiet.

The other day I was standing in the garden, standing still for long enough to prompt my husband to ask 

“What is it?”

“Everything’s yellow.” Was all I could say, was all I could see.

The gold of finches

rods and hours

carried out of August

on the legs of waning bees.

The next day I was seeing positively red

Red as lobster shells. Red as lobster shells screaming to be seared and simmered into Lobster Fra Diavolo. The kind of red that people go to war for, a distillate, mother red that makes our ancestral neurons fire back to spilling blood for sacrifice and burying our dead in mounds of ochre. We will do all kinds of things for color like that purple we get from soaking lichens in jars of piss to dye the emperor's robes. The shells of lobster, ripe tomatoes, chili flake, a crimson trinity, each their own distinct red, came together under the magnifying lense of olive oil for full saturation like a tribute to their shared essential redness. 

When the octopus goes sanguine, there’s no need for small talk, we can see just what she means. Painted lips, poison frogs, rosehips ripening, flamebelly trout in autumn. Come hither, don’t you dare, stop, go, I guess the red signal’s not so clear, but it’s always loud - yes or no - never, maybe. 

This meal was a vivid “eat me” red, and we obliged. We sucked those little legs dry and slurped the spaghetti so the sauce reddened our lips and burned like the devil brother I had hoped for when I poured twice the suggested chili flake into the shimmering oil. We washed it down with red, not the