Purple Prose

When I say February, do you picture red? Love and hearts and all that? What about blue, since it falls in wintertime for the Northern Hemisphere? Do you even see a color or taste the temperature?

Between blue and red reside purple. February is purple. The stone, amethyst is always purple, unlike some other chameleon gemstones, amethyst is crystallized as the stone of February.

February and I have been in a lifelong relationship. Yes, I was born in the small month and I was probably purple myself on that day many years ago. February has always been purple, cool, aloof and superior. I am not over embellishing either, there is not much time or space. It is a condensed month, it is a mourning and morning month. Pink Jasmine, lilac vines, star quantities of white and pink blossomed trees are all in chilly bloom matching the steel winter skies.
February could care less about us and our expectations our resolutions, our plans, our dates, our hopes, our disappointments. It comes and goes leaving only a stain of chocolate in the corners of the calendar.

The first purple (Tyrian) dye came from a snail. My grandfather used to give me a bag of salt and instructed me to find and kill all the slugs I could find. I did not look very hard for slugs but now I wonder if a stain was left where they decomposed?

Purple is not violet, a common mistake. Violets are blue. Why do we like roses that don't smell? Purple doesn’t actually exist optically. And I bet my purple is not the same as your purple. Purple tinted moss and urine also make a brilliant royal purple dye. In 1993 a crayon was added to the box called ‘Purple Mountains Majesty’ to represent the Rayleigh scattering effect which makes distant mountains appear hazy purple. A purple heart medal does no soldier stationed in the grave any good. There is no such mammal as a Purple People Eater. Purple Haze and Purple Rain are music and not meteorological events. And Robert Burns used the word curple to make his rhyme making us all feel a little like a horses ass for reading poetry.

Purple is velvet, it is midnight seduction, jazz music, the reflection streetlamps in a street puddle after a rain, it is a mumuration in the sky, the soft folds of the human body that are never touched, purple is a marriage of hot and cold, it is a dance with two leading, a blur of friction, it is the aura of wisdom, it is the inside of my mind on a clear path.

'Inside of a geode' taken 2008 in Public Domain.