Wednesday, November 9, 2022 // The Statement — 2
A love letter to yellow
Fall used to be yellow.
Much less the color of the leaves and more
the color of corn in my hands. I have a hazy
memory of walking through a corn maze with
my family when I was eight or nine. I remem-
ber shucking cobs and leaving the husks on the
paths, marking the ways we’d been. I remem-
ber the way the corn towered over me. An
all-surrounding yellow, one that almost con-
sumed me. Above me, around me, in my hands
and under my feet.
Now, in Ann Arbor, yellow comes in scarce
doses. There are no cornfield walls, just yel-
low leaves, mixed in with the red and orange
and green. I see yellow in my lemonade and
at the Big House, but the yellow grows to be
few and far between. That yellow is nice,
don’t get me wrong, but that yellow doesn’t
quite feel like home.
They say absence makes the heart grow
fonder, and that seems about right to me. As
my to-do list grows longer, my heart grows
heavier, and I think about those days in the
cornfields much more. I think about worming
my way through the mazes with my family. I
think about my dad lifting me over his head
until, for as far as I can see, there is yellow
corn, consuming the earth like it had just con-
sumed me.
In all reality, though, I wasn’t all that pas-
sionate about the corn when I saw it back then.
The yellow memory is clearer — a yellow I know
I can’t grasp again.
All I have now is the yellow of Ann Arbor —
a manufactured maize pumped with market-
ing material. That yellow doesn’t feel the same
as the hair of corn between my fingers, or the
crunch of husks beneath my feet. Now I wish
I hadn’t rushed through that corn maze at the
moment. I wish I had more memories of the yel-
low enveloping me. Instead all I have are these
hazy images, and even so I can find nothing that
compares. I wish to have that innocence again,
that safety, shucking yellow corn because I was
bored, waiting to go home.
The yellow in Ann Arbor, and the yellow
back home, reminds me that there is something
that is lost now. That there is something I can-
not get back. That doesn’t stop me from trying,
from chasing it through the memories of yellow,
the yellow of Michigan, the yellow of not just
fall, but of all the seasons, all year round.
***
I can’t remember when my family stopped
putting up Christmas lights.
We’re not the only dark house on the block
during the holiday season, but we certainly
stand out when squashed between red and
green lights, maybe some purple. A house
down the street glitters with white, light-up
snowflakes. Another house projects different
Christmas-themed images on the side of the
house.
I think we stopped putting up the lights
because it got too hard for my dad to do on his
own. That is a real shame, because my father
had hands for lights like no other. We had Santa
and all of his reindeer, crashing their sleigh into
our snow-topped roof. We had snowmen glow-
ing in our front yard. Every line, every window,
decked with lights.
And all of them were yellow.
They were beautiful. I remember seeing
them for the first time each year, and feeling
that yellow haze light up my entire body. Back
then, our house earned a sparkling reputa-
tion on our neighborhood block. The yellow
outshined all the red and green, the sparkling
snowflakes, the projectors. My driveway, my
porch, once mundane and almost ugly, became
a magical place.
Many years later, I no longer lived on that
street. I was a college student, far away from
home for the first time in my life. I lived in
Ann Arbor — Mary Markley to be precise
—and there were no lights in my dorm hall,
which was a real shame, because if anyone
needs a bit of magic, it’s a college freshman
during the holiday season. It was my first
snow away from home, and frankly, it was
my first everything away from home. That
weight hung heavy on my heart, as heavy as
the lights probably felt in my dad’s arms as he
carried them up the ladder.
BY RILEY HODDER, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Photos courtesy of Riley Hodder, Design by Jeremy Weine