There’s a specific kind of yellow you only see when the April sun hits the kitchen table just right.

I was sitting there watching the golden hour stretch across a bowl of lemons my neighbor dropped off, and for a second, my brain didn't see fruit. I saw high-grade carnotite, that bright canary-yellow uranium ore that used to make a prospector’s heart skip a beat back in the boom days. It’s funny how the eyes work; after forty years of squinting at outcrops, you start seeing the whole world through a geological lens.
People talk about art in galleries, but there’s a real art to calibrating your vision to the subtle shifts in a canyon wall or the way a certain mineral reflects a dying sun. You learn to spot the difference between a fool’s glimmer and the real deal just by the weight of the light. I appreciate the citrus, truly, but it’s a temporary beauty. You can’t run a power grid on lemons, though they sure do brighten up a quiet spring evening while I’m planning my next trip into the Basin.