11/14/2020 colors.
COLOR
- The color of defeat. Every morning I say I’m going to make fresh coffee. Instead, I heat up yesterday’s. I went to a retreat a few years back and started to do the same. The leader took the cup out of my hand and said, ‘you deserve fresh coffee, kate’. The blue and white of my mug are chipped. This is the last of the dishware that my parents brought back from Thailand. Eerily new England. The balance between practicality and self-worth is one to be aware of. Keep it, keep it, keep it, reuse it, reuse it. It becomes a mantra that can overload a home, and keep me bogged down in broken down things. I have enough coffee to make myself a fresh pot. And warmed up coffee just isn’t that good. Now why is that? But. It is not today’s prompt.
- Black. I made a fresh pot. Black though, can’t be written currently without bowing to the systems of oppression that I am a part of. It’s a bow. That’s what I can do, here, when not kneeling.
- Green. Today’s my first Saturday since June without my summer job, at the farm. Sitting outside, moving greens around, washing squash or lettuce? Such a joy. Customers are lovely, even masked. And freshness. And I love my farmer. I’m home today, and have a long list of what I will do with all this time and I keep having to remind myself that I have the ENTIRE day, so I can go to my garden shop any time, all afternoon, and I can maybe stop procrastinating and just get the writing done.
- Yellow. I’m still chicken about getting the writing done. Failure is most assuredly an option.
- I’m still wildly in love with my chimney. So lets appreciate the fact that it is IN the house, in my kitchen, ruddy red exposed brick of glory. My last house had exposed brick as well. I nod to the handmade nature of my life, even still. What I like always bears the sign of a handprint. Always.
- Purple. The underside of the houseplants I am staring at are purple. Fuzzy too. And then there is a row of fuschia near the ‘christmas cactuses’. When they bloom in the fall every year, why am I still calling them Christmas cacti? Purple and fuschia are not generally my friends but my god, sometimes? It’s the savior of the day, that kind of bright.
- Kaleidoscope. I’ve started to wonder lately if I have some sort of ADD. Personality wise, I’d say absolutely no. But when I look around at how distractable I am? When I see myself doing 14 things on the way to doing the thing I got up for? I know there is an element of plain old mothering in it, I mean there is a hell of a lot of little stuff to be done, and picking up one thing on the way to the other thing is how shit gets done. But I wonder if the impact of technology has affected me a little? The constancy of the phone distraction? This is not a sudden thought, but a serious wonder. Its not like I want to take meds, and I’ve a friend who is seriously ADD and I’m pretty sure I don’t have that, but how do I shut it down? This flutter of flit.
- Grey smoke. When someone doesn’t communicate well, and you try to fill up space with your own thoughts and they swirl around each other, and its beautiful, but the two are still separate, like a lava lamp.
- I’m wearing my favorite sweater. It’s a wool tunic of sorts and its raspberry. Its not a beret, but every time I look at it, I hear Prince. Though I’m pretty sure he’s never seen a middle-aged woman in a raspberry tunic and thought of me. Although, maybe in heaven he’s finally seen the light? I think he’s possibly the one man I’d be intimidated by, sexually speaking.
- Sun. While not a color, per se, it sure does bring out the layers of color in everything. For that matter, so does shade, but you have to be really looking. The sun just smacks you in the face with it. It says: LOOK! LOOK AT THIS!! OVER HERE!! It’s THE natural highlighter. Even cardboard can be luminous.
