Tuesday, January 13, 2009

195: Tuesday is Purple


Over on Curious Bird, the color week continues, and today is purple. My home is full of browns and beiges, reds and greens and blues and grays, earthy tones. If it were summer, I would immediately fill you with wildflowers: here, here, here. Shades of violet are in no short supply. But in my winter home, purple is not to be found.

With one very strange exception: a wooden salad server, given to us at our wedding by the Kings, former colleagues, the wife of which was head of the department at the first school at which I taught, the husband of which runs Red Dragonfly Press. Purple, lonely amongst the bamboo spoons, the grays of winter seeping in, the beige and brick walls.

I wonder how homes find their colors. I know it is the occupants, that special style, the ways our own eyes catch and light upon things. We're lucky when our partners match the decor, or when you know one day you will live together, so shopping for a sofa for his apartment isn't such a harrowing ordeal. I love our home with its heavy woods, its gray-green furniture, the wooden slat shades.

But purple, you allude me. And please, please, never pink. (Pink is Thursday.) I don't know where it would be hiding in this place. Warm, sunny colors like orange and yellow will be tricky too, but pink, but purple. What I lack. Give me blue, give me green, give me brown. Give me the earth.

4 comments:

Chrissy said...

your photo is lovely, but lovelier are your words! i'll be back for more, soon.

jenna said...

You might not have much purple, but what you do have is pretty impressive - that is quite the spoon. :)

won said...

Purple...my, how I wish weren't a day late! I adore purple and would have had a blast with this.

Purple is the color of my late daughter. Her room, her dispisition, her everything...her vision was tinted in purple.

Thank you for opening that door to purple in these pages.

Anonymous said...

haha! try living with two little girls in the house :) plenty of pink has seeped in, even though I said it never would. it's grown on me, though, i have to say.

and my favorite color is red, so heavens, that's everywhere here :)