Right now the tangelos, satsumas and lemons on the fruit trees in our backyard are ripe and beautiful, golden hued citrus baubles with every glance out the window, providing visual warmth as winter sets in, and yet another example of how God provides natural gifts for what we need during the season we need it most. The color in my landscape brought to mind a post I wrote years ago in response to a writing prompt.
A photo from the Daily Post.
The photograph: a wall of color in the sunshine, the building unknown, someplace in Texas or Mexico, maybe. A painted man in a painted window, ribbons of color flowing from his two dimensional hands. The photo, captioned “Creativity” was the one that drew me in. Why was I drawn to this photo?
Maybe it’s because, like the painted man, I don’t have a “favorite” color. There was a favorite aqua refrigerator, once, from the house I lived in with my college roommates on Ross Boulevard in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. A favorite bright blue radiator that warmed my apartment on W. 107th in Manhattan. A favorite orange sorority t-shirt now long gone, that I only wore because my boyfriend at the time hated it. It’s so…orange, he would say. There were favorite photos taken for a photography class assignment of crimson tulips shot in macro, and a street portrait I took of a stranger carrying a hot pink umbrella.
Maybe I’m drawn to this photograph because its bright mural reminds me of the colors of my travels, of the photos never snapped with my camera that are tucked away in my mind: pieces of orange rind scattered on the concrete outside the Tate Modern on a cloudy day in London, a splash of yellow flowers being carried along a crowded sidewalk in Paris, the bright red poppies of Tuscany, a soft pink sky at dawn outlining sleepy fishing boats off the coast of Barcelona as our plane prepared for landing, or the way the sunlight illuminated the yellow stripes of tropical fish during a snorkeling trip in Mexico. Just last night I read through an old travel journal, written when I was eighteen during a road trip from Alabama to California with my parents, and came across an entry written from the backseat, in the desert of Arizona, where I wrote that I missed the pale green grass and pink flowers we had seen scattered along interstate 10 in eastern Texas. I had forgotten that, of course. Kind of amazing to me now, when I consider that my wedding china pattern is a band of pale green etched with a delicate pink flower or two.
Isn’t it funny, then, that for a long time, I didn’t even consider myself a fan of color? Tasteful was, for me, a Holly Golightly black shift dress or something J Crew in an unobtrusive shade. Maybe that’s why my mother was surprised and disappointed when I showed her all of the bridal bouquets I’d pinned to my inspiration board on The Knot.com. Lots of yellows and oranges and some greens, when she’d pictured lots of creamy white petals and baby’s breath. Planning a wedding in less than three months, I hadn’t had time to think before hand about what color my flowers “should be”. I was just pinning pictures of what I liked.
Ms. Judi, who baked our wedding cake, was the one who shed some light on the subject. When we went to meet her, I had no idea what kind of cake I wanted. My future husband and I sat looking through pages and pages of beautiful cakes and she told me to point out the ones that spoke to me. It was overwhelming at first, not as easy as I had thought. But the first thing I said was “I don’t want a white cake. More like a creamy yellow.” I have no idea where those words came from, only that they excited Ms. Judi, who said as much as she loves her job, she gets tired of making white cakes.
I pointed out pictures that spoke to me, mostly cakes with fresh flowers and some with bands of ribbon around them. Finally, Ms. Judi turned to my future husband and said “This girl LOVES color.”
It felt good to hear. Finally I gave myself permission! To embrace yellow for my bridesmaid’s dress, to place an order for a bridal bouquet of yellow freesias, coral roses and pale green hydrangea, to register for a china pattern that was anything but classic. Our cake was decorated with creamy yellow buttercream frosting topped with fresh flowers matching my bouquet and trimmed with pale yellow ribbon. And it was delicious.
I should have known my husband was “the one” the day he texted me a picture he’d taken on his smartphone, about a month after we met. The picture was a rainbow and the text read “saw this today and thought you might like it.” He already knew I was a girl who loved color, and he’s been coloring my world ever since.
alittleway 