It’s the first color association most of us are taught: red means stop, and green means go. (According to the movie Starman, and most drivers, yellow means ‘go very fast,’ but that’s another story.)

When I was contemplating my interpretation of today’s August Break prompt – green – I originally considered using a photograph of some green beans I cooked recently. I love that they look green, smell green, taste green, and lend themselves to an audio interpretation:

• The rush of cool water over them as you rinse off the dirt.
• The satisfying snap as you remove the prickly end bits.
• The soft hiss of steam being released as they heat up during cooking.
• The muffled squeak when you chew them (my husband hates that part).

It would have been an appropriate, if awfully literal, interpretation of the prompt.

But then I saw the green ‘ready’ light on the microphone I recently acquired – a microphone called the Blue Mikey that plugs into the lightning port of an iPad (in my case, my brand new iPad mini). I hate the name, but I love the microphone because it means I don’t have to sit on my hands when I record in my living room or kitchen, and am using this setup instead of my lovely FocusRite Scarlet mic and pre-amp upstairs.

I come from an Italian family. I talk with my hands. A lot.

I mean, I use the upstairs rig for audio drama, but for this daily project, which isn’t quite on the fly, being able to sit at my table and watch the light shimmer on the swimming pool (which is no longer green thanks to the awesome pool guy I hired a year and a half ago) while I record is a very good thing.

There’s a green light on the mic and a green mic symbol in the app I’m using – BossJock – and green bars to tell me if my levels are okay, and then there’s the other kind of green as well…

The green of being inexperienced.

My podcasting is… lackadaisical at best. I joined Dog Days (late) a few years ago after Tabz and Nutty encouraged me to try it, and while (every year) Nutty encourages me to continue beyond the project and (every year) I mean to and don’t, I haven’t ever put enough time into learning the technical aspects of things to please myself.

It’s not that I’m not technical. I used to be a tech support trainer for a major computer company.

It has everything to do with how I choose to spend my time, and I find that writing and acting are more valuable to me than learning how to create a promo or even a slickly produced podcast.

There may even be an element of dread involved – if I have to spend that much time on it, this project becomes work and not fun. (Yes, this is ironic coming from the woman who writes book reviews and edits an ezine all day long, and then writes fanfic for fun and relaxation afterward, but, there it is.)

And so, instead, I look at the green light on the mic with just a little bit of trepidation, because I’m pretty sure the only person who digs what I’m writing is me, and I try to be cognizant of the way the green bar is rising and falling on the iPad screen, and when I finally press the green button labeled finish it’s with equal parts excitement and relief.

Yellow has never been my favorite color. I know it’s supposed to be a happy color, and I’m told it really warms up kitchens, especially, but I’ve never been fond of it. It might be because I have just enough olive in my skin tone that, with the exception of icy pastel yellow – the color of lemon sorbet – yellow clothing makes me look really sallow.

Even jaundiced.

I just don’t think the dying-of-scurvy look is that attractive.

But there are some yellow things I really appreciate.

I like the rich, saturated Tuscan yellow of the walls of my dining room.

I like the way lemons even smell yellow, and I especially like the way a bowl of lemons looks when it’s sitting out on the counter.

And I love sunflowers.

I’ve always loved sunflowers.

I’m an August Leo, so my birth flower (yes, that’s a thing) is the poppy. Actually there are two birth flowers for August: poppies and gladiolus. Now, I like both of those. I specially love buying tall stalks of glads for this ridiculously tall turquoise glass vase that lives in the Word Lounge.

But if it were up to me, the official birth flower for August would be the sunflower.

I mean, really, what could be more appropriate? Sunflowers are bright and cheerful – exactly what you need to chase away the deep summer doldrums. They follow the sun worshipfully, and, let’s face it, there isn’t a single Leo out there who doesn’t appreciate a little bit of worship from time to time.

But most of all, I like them because as far as flowers go, sunflowers, the classic bright-yellow discs with the thick green stalks, are fairly egalitarian. I mean, think about it. Sunflowers grow wild in freeway medians and along fields, but they’re also grown purposefully, so that their seeds can be put to use.

Sunflowers can be planted and cultivated, but they’re just as likely to spring up naturally. My grandfather once had a healthy crop of them spring into being in his compost heap, which we all thought was terribly funny at the time, though I don’t remember why.

A friend of mine has sunflowers growing in her front yard. Some years they’re more robust and more prolific than others, but in 2014 they were glorious and bountiful, and she brought me a bunch for my birthday, presented in a mason jar, which she apologized for, though honestly, I cannot imagine a more appropriate way to present them.

That mason jar full of sunflowers made me smile for days, until they finally faded away, as all flowers, and all summers do.

And sunflowers are the first thing I think of when I hear the word, ‘yellow.’

Well, that’s not entirely true.

The very first thing is the line from the first chapter of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when Arthur Dent notices the bulldozer outside his house.

But sunflowers come right after.