'For each season, a light. In spring, when I look out my window, I see hills and trees lit with a green I used to puzzle over as a child. In the big Crayola box, one unnatural green was labeled 'veridian', and when I coloured trees with it I thought it was a fake green. It's the olive in the neon martini sign, brazen green, blue-green with a dollop of sun dropped in, a bikini I once wore in Nicaragua. But here it turns innocent at evening, swathes every new grassy hillside, each budding almond or plum. The light is glassy, gossamer, silvery - it seems to slide over the crests of the low Apennines in the distance. In spring, almonds, the earliest flowers, start the sequence of plum, apple, pear, and cherry, all famous for their brief love affairs with light.'
from In Tuscany by Frances Mayes
