It was such an odd thing to find there in the shady corner of the garden. A yellow ribbon scarcely moving in the breeze. Actually to say that it was a yellow ribbon is to make assumptions based on other yellow things that I have experienced in the span of my life. If one were to honestly and accurately attempt to describe its color one would be looking more for descriptors in the light tan and russet brown region of the paint department. Anjou Pair (VERY ripe), Autumn Sage (late November), Sickly Child. And, in truth, the ribbon was no longer the color of itself but bore the dressings of years of accretions of who knows what born on the wind and delivered by the sticky proboscis of bee and fly and summer midge. Sickly Child with a glaze of Bacon Fat. Anjou Pear with accents of Dark Corn Syrup. Autumn Sage dipped in Oil-Change Residue.

The colors weren’t colors that one encountered in successful interiors. There was a vaguely familiar hint of the 1970s about them. Knitwear specifically. They were the colors of a knitted sleeveless sweater that my father had worn at the weekends as he relaxed in a deckchair by the mud flats. That was why the ribbon had caught my eye and held me transfixed, though it took me several minutes to peel back the camouflage and finally discover dad there, with his angry squint turned into the wind. I had spilled his tea and spoiled what was left of the afternoon. Dad and I loved to be by the estuary at the weekends watching the gulls peck at the bubbles in the mud, listening to the sports scores and post game analysis on the wireless, hunching our shoulders as the damp breezes rose and fell, a thermos of tea and a packet of McVities. I stared at the ribbon and remembered the soft comfort of my father‘s sweater against my cheek as he hugged me on our way back to the car in the late afternoon chill.