Some colors are tied to a place. Others are tied to a memory.
Sitka Rose is both.
Sitka is a town in Southeast Alaska, and a place I returned to as a teenager for fine arts camp. But the name takes me back even further—to the rose that grew in the yard of the home where I grew up in Ketchikan.
It wasn’t the perfectly cultivated kind of rose you’d find in a formal garden. It was wilder than that—hardy, a little unruly, and beautiful in its own way. Year after year it returned, bringing its vivid pink blooms and green leaves with it, and attracting bumblebees that seemed to find it as irresistible as I did.
The name carries both places with it: Sitka, where I spent little pieces of my youth, and the rose that grew outside my childhood home.
A little wild. A little nostalgic. And unmistakably Alaska to me.