The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

by J. Drew Lanham

My plumage is a kaleidoscopic rainbow of an eternal hope and the deepest blue of despair and darkness. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.

The season has always drawn a sort of restlessness from me. The Germans have a fine word for it: zugunruhe. A compound derived from the roots zug (migration) and unruhe (anxiety), it describes the seasonal migration of birds and other animals.