The Persistence of Color

When I was seven, my grandmother kept a bowl of bruised fruit on the windowsill of our kitchen in Enugu. I remember asking her why she didn’t throw the soft, dark-spotted apples away. She told me that the skin might be tired, but the sweetness inside was still working hard to stay alive. I spent that entire winter watching them. They didn’t look like the shiny, perfect things in the market stalls; they looked like survivors. There is a strange, quiet dignity in things that refuse to fall when the air turns sharp and the world decides it is time for everything to go dormant. We are often taught that beauty is found in the pristine, in the unblemished surface that has never known a frost. But I think there is something much deeper in the things that hold their ground, clinging to the branches long after the warmth has retreated, proving that even in the cold, life has a stubborn, vibrant color of its own. What is it that keeps us holding on when the season demands we let go?

James L Brown has captured this exact defiance in his photograph titled Bad Apples. It is a reminder that even when the world turns white and quiet, there is still a pulse of color waiting to be noticed. Does this image make you look at the winter trees differently?