Good question

What do these colors mean?

I am walking along the sidewalk as I always do. Massachusetts Street. Downtown Lawrence, Kansas. The sun is lowering in the southwest. It’s a wintering sun. The red brick wall of the Journal-World is nearly the color of glowing embers, but not quite. The wall is the color of that particular red brick reflecting the fire of the angled sun.

Yet it seems that it is more than that. How can that be? The bricks are the color of clay from the earth, hardened in fire. The sun’s ray’s are reddened by the extra length they have traveled through the atmosphere. And still there’s a glowing of a color not seen at other times.

But I have no complaint about the color of that wall in the high afternoon in the middle of the hottest summer day. Or its color on a gray day with rain washing down its sides. The color of that red brick wall varies and I change as well, almost imperceptibly. So is that what the colors mean?

And yet I seem to prefer that reflecting fire color. Perhaps more because I have seen that wall in other light, in other seasons and so I can notice how it appears in this moment. But why should I care?

I walk along these storefronts nearly every day. I see the sidewalks empty and full of people. The earth moves and the sun appears to move, from east to west, higher in the sky and lower with the seasons. Clouds or not. All these things appear in front of my eyes. Why should the colors matter?

And all the days and hours and minutes that I walk past that wall and the others, if coincidence occurs, a shadow line appears - the line from the edge of the storefronts on the western side of the street divides the wall across the way into the glowing upper portion from the darker lower one. 

And all these other colors as well, up and down the street, are interesting in their own way.

This is all a commonplace. Often I barely fail to notice all these colors in their profusion, the sky also appearing above in its shades of blue and gray and white and sometime blazes of fiery colors spread out like a flame. Or is it the other way around? And yet sometimes I see some of these many colors in their patterns and textures and in a certain light, and sometimes it seems to matter very much to me.

Evolutionary biology explains a great deal for me, but this is not what my ancestors saw walking along the savannah. What manner of species have we humans become that the colors I see walking along Mass Street mean something to me sometimes?

I’m looking for an answer but not one you might give me. I’m searching for an answer I might find for myself. It’s sometimes something to do as I walk along. This is after all only my small, occasional question, not even a preoccupation. But as the sun appears to go down behind the curve of this earth, I’m beginning to suspect I may not find all of the answers to what all of the colors mean.

I do like to see that one fire-reflecting-from-red-brick color, and several other colors as well. It has been something to see.