Home is Yellow

what is home? where do we find it? who is allowed to have one?

Home is yellow.

I needed to practice home this weekend. Re-ground. Re-member. Slow down. Lick wounds. Re-group. I am able to do this, in the ways my soul requires and I stand in solidarity with the Palestinians who are not.

Where I live, in the deep wooded suburbs of Atlanta, everything is green-to-gold right now. Everything is somehow all day bathed and glowing in late afternoon sunlight. October everywhere here, has opened up into a play of burnished light and shadow that holds both light and longing. Warmth and the beauty and promise of things dying in right time.

Arabia Mountain Preserve is a home for me. I visited twice this weekend, once by myself and again, on Sunday, to prove its golden beauty to my husband. Challenges of the previous week compelled my Saturday visit. I had to go. The mountain, made of a distinctive ‘tidal grey’ gneiss that used to be quarried for any number of federal buildings, has been left alone now to move in accordance with deep time. Its scale is beyond me, but it holds all of its micro-ecologies with gentle respect for their own briefer cycles. When I sit with Arabia in stillness, breathing slowly, becoming one of its micro-ecologies for the time being, I can remember that infinite timelines coexist and speed and efficiency are not the drivers of all.

Arabia’s woods are showing off their yellow now. Framing the lake in gold. Languishing in unhurried but setting sunlight. Crickets chirp. A discarded Fanta can twinkles. Its flinty glint reflecting the last rays.

Flavor is a kind of home.

I baked a cake this weekend too, to remember home back into my body through sense and muscle memory. A yellow cake was called for. A cake of birthdays, of Sunday dinners and church suppers. A cake of funerals. I’ve linked to it before, but Deb Freeman’s piece on yellow cake is one of my favorite’s for the way it pulls our voices into her analysis of Black folks’ love of yellow cake. I love the fact too, that for most of us, the cake recalls matrilineal lines of care— grandmothers, aunties, and like in my case, mamas. Yellow cake reminds me of my mom and baking one pulls her into my kitchen, close to me. I chose yellow cake this weekend not for nostalgia though, but for strength to move forward.

Rereading Freeman’s piece now, I’m struck by the following passage:

Yellow cake “represents perseverance and the determination of the human spirit. Black people have encountered so much pain just because of the color of our skin in this country, and yet by the simple act of baking a cake, we were able to instill a feeling of normalcy in our loved ones, if only for a moment. These are the small, everyday moments that seem to reside in our collective memories, and if there were a flavor profile for “home,” it would be yellow cake.”

There. I haven’t baked in a while but intuited that four layers of tender-crumbed, vanilla-scented yellow cake and the technical challenge of stacking and frosting them with a fudgy but goopy American buttercream was exactly the prayer I needed this weekend. A prayer honoring the perseverance and determination of the human spirit. A prayer in anti-colonial solidarity. A prayer for the sanctity of simple acts and everyday moments. A prayer in remembrance of what and who I am made of and what I carry forward. I’m working on a writing project now about cake-centered rituals and practices for moving through difficult times and the cake recipe I share will be one for yellow cake. Nothing gets you through like it.

Our house is actually yellow.

It wasn’t that long ago that scientists figured out that not only do birds see and respond to color, but they can view colors on the spectrum well beyond what humans perceive. Birds are tetrachromats. This is not just a cool band name. It means that they have a fourth color-detecting cone in their eyes (where humans have three) that allows them to see ultra-violet light and whatever colors that produces. In addition to colors we can’t even describe, birds can see purple, blue, green, orange, red, and yes, yellow. Color varies in importance by species. Hummingbirds are attracted to red and orange because most bird pollinated flowers are this color. Other birds use color during cuffing season to seek out plumage that mirrors their own.

I’ve been imagining, in my meditations this weekend, that birds use color to find food, mates, but also home. About four months ago, I noticed a dark blob wedged in the corner ledge of my porch. I’m kind of scary when it comes to bugs and animals on and in my house so I got the flashlight. It was a bird. And its mate joined in the other corner the next night. They are Carolina wrens, they chose my home as refuge, and they became family.

Something I heard Fred Moten say in a video of a panel discussion I watched once lives in my head rent free. It was something about his Grandmother maybe never having owned a home but knowing how to share one. The wisdom in understanding the ultimate illusion of ownership and the heart skill of being able to shift orientation towards care! I aspire. And the wrens have afforded me the opportunity to practice home like Fred Moten’s Grandmother. To recognize kinship—even beyond difference.

Are birds easier than people? Yes. And still. I kept the blinds shut so the light wouldn’t disturb, making a thin slit with two fingers to peek in a goodnight wish before bed. They’d always be off to work or play by the time I woke but for a couple of times I happened to stir early enough to catch their morning routine. I made the tiny slit in the blinds, shooed the dogs away and held still, barely breathing. After a while, a little neck stretch in profile, with thin beak pointing up and then down. Preen and fluff and then a short, wobbly walk a foot or two down the thin ledge snug against the porch on the left side in order to test out the right wing. Another little walk back towards the corner, stretching and waking up the other wing. Preen and fluff. A pause of consideration, weighing the timing maybe or what lies ahead for the day. And then, with a fluttering swoop, gone.

At least one of the wren couple returned home each evening for months. When they didn’t show and tuck in, I worried after them. While I think I hear the male’s varied and loudmouthed calls during the day still, neither has come back to the porch for days.

Right now, Georgia is green-to-gold but all the news is blood red. I’m praying for a ceasefire, dreaming yellow dreams of home, and hoping the wrens eventually find their way back.

xx