Field Note: The Greens That Stay

There are greens you notice immediately.

Spring grass after rain. The first leaves opening along a creek. A meadow in June when everything seems determined to grow at once.

And then there are the greens that stay.

Pine needles beneath your boots. Lichen tucked into stone. The darker needles high in an evergreen where the sunlight doesn't quite reach. Colors that have been there so long they seem less like decoration and more like part of the structure of a place.

I kept noticing that with Fern.

Set it beside worn wood and old canvas, and the green settles in. Take it outside among the pines and it becomes quieter still. Even against the wide Wyoming landscape, it doesn't try to imitate the scenery so much as belong somewhere within it.

Maybe that is why some colors are easier to live with than others.

Not because they are neutral, exactly.

Because they have learned how to keep company.

Fern is one of the Laramie worsted weight wools gathered for Copper Crow, a sturdy 2-ply yarn with the kind of stitch definition that lets the work show. Cables have room to cast their little shadows. Ribbing looks purposeful. Simple stitches remain simple without becoming plain.

It feels suited to the things that become familiar through use—a sweater pulled on when the morning is colder than expected, a hat waiting near the door, mittens eventually shaped to the hands that wear them.

Things that don't need to remain new to remain beautiful.

Perhaps color can be that way, too.

Some colors arrive loudly and ask to be noticed.

Others simply stay.

And after a while, you cannot quite imagine the landscape without them.

Crow Note

Some colors don't ask to be noticed.

They simply belong.