Green

I’m waiting on hearing about who won this week’s Header Challenge so that I can change the results in my side board.    I think it is funny that I am actually waiting to update it.  Usually it is a couple of weeks old.   However, Tom has already given the assignment for next week and I gotta admit it makes me a bit sad. 

The theme is, “Let it Snow!”    Oh how I wish it was.  Snowing.   Colour and weather, they’re funny things in my book.  What causes a person to like a particular color or weather and not like another?

My folks were both from rather desolate regions, mom more so than dad, well that’s how they put it anyway.  But because of where they grew up, when they landed in western Washington, moss capital of the world, they were thrilled with the year-round-ness of green.  Our yard was long on evergreens and short on deciduous save for fruit trees and fruiting bushes.  If there was a choice between something that flowered but died back and a juniper, juniper won. 

My dad loved azaleas and rhododendrons, the flowers were nice but the fact that it was evergreen?  Fantastic!  Broadleaf tree other than apple and pear in our yard?  Madrone.  We did have one deciduous flowering bush, a lilac.  Set where in the yard?  Far obscure corner of course. 

I had no idea that the deciduous azaleas were so incredibly fragrant until I was an orphaned adult.  My father disdained them.  On what basis you might ask?  “They lose their stinkin’ leaves Lanny, let’s get this Caroline azalea for you instead.”  Well that and they mostly bloom in orange, not a fav color of my dad’s, he was a pink and purple fellow.  Luckily he hated dandelion yellow as much as I did (but he liked plain daffs more than I, complete with spring Sunday drives to the Valley!). 

Wait.  It’s cuz he hated dandelions that I hate that particular colour of yellow.  It was my job to eradicate them from the lawn, by hand, well hand and the nifty screwdriver, right after I scooped poo and stacked wood.

Mind you, I was the youngest in the family of six children, so any moving around was done before I was born.  I only knew the one childhood home, one weather pattern, one garden lay out, until I left for college. 

Rarely, and I really mean rarely, did snow ever stay on the ground for more than a week.  The times we got more than a skiff of snow are permanently etched in my brain.  I was so excited to be going to college east of the mountains where it snowed so much that some of the campus sidewalks are heated to keep them passable!  What the heck!  The first thing I packed were my skis and mittens.    

That winter was the winter that broke the region’s ski resorts.  Hardly a flake in the whole state that year.  Two years before, our economics teacher in high school got us to rent a bus on Thanksgiving vacation to go skiing.  The year I went to college you were lucky if you finally went skiing on Christmas vacation to any of the passes and only if you had a crappy spare pair of skis that could endure rock skiing.  Things didn’t improve at the turn of the calendar either so mid-winter break as well as every weekend was a dismal disappointment for skiing and the whole college experience an all around failure,  all because of western Washington type weather on the east side.  Well that and a few F’s but I blame those on the weather as well.

Crest fallen I returned home, disappointed and discouraged from ever living in a place that would have snow on the ground week to week. 

I wrote Green in the title box because I gotta say that even though it is favorite second to persimmon and ahead of aubergine, not needing me to call it anything but green, only just to use and embrace a wide spectrum of it, everywhere, about now, I’m sick of green.  In January I will hate it, spit on it and call it names.  It walls me in.  Everywhere I look, every day, there is a wall of green capped by a deep grey colour that can only be fully appreciated at the beach while collecting clams. 

Yes, in the fall the wall-of-green is smattered with bits of fire, merlot, brick, persimmon, copper, sulfur, and gold.   And shortly in the spring there are pink and peachy tones showering down everywhere and it is lovely.  And even in the dead green of winter, the wall has a few traces of chocolate and gravy brown branches and the baseboards of cinnamon toasty grasses feed my color hungry eyes. Yet, it is a challenge to escape the enveloping greenness of my home region.

Funny that green is used to soothe the mood of the mentally ill and criminally insane,  for somewhere at the first of February I do believe that I’m sure I could become just those from looking up from my work only to find the permanent wall-of-green.  And sky of cast iron.

Isn’t it odd, that I have room after room in my house that uses green as a foundation color? There isn’t a white or off-white wall in the place, not since Bethel passed in ’94.  Fifteen years of marriage it took, ‘fore I could bust away from my mother’s admonitions to use off white on the walls, brown on the carpet and furniture and then go for a bit, just a bit mind you, of color in the throw pillows?  She could make a person begin to despise brown as well (but that will never happen, chocolate, coffee and cinnamon toast make me too happy).

Shortly after her death I discovered you can have color on the walls.  And the furniture and throw pillows. All sorts of color and more than two.   Who cares if no one but the painter and tosser of pillows thinks it looks good.  Dirt still came home at night and the children still grew up.  Its nice only having two goals in life eh?

But I do think it is odd that I love snow so much but rarely do I choose white as a colour? Save for my appliances, always white – after all, the only other choice there is steel, hmmm what color is our sky most of the time, why would I purpose to use steel grey on anything!  There isn’t enough vitamin D in the world to counter act steel grey!

And for some reason I do love my white sheers on my windows, and white twinkly lights strung all through the house.  I love a white sink, even if it becomes pitted and discolored from the iron in the water.  But only in the kitchen.  One reason I’m not looking forward to the bathroom remodel is that I will have to put in white fixtures and say good bye to my… green ones!

See, I really do love green, really I do, all sorts of greens.   I just wish the outdoor green was thickly covered with white right now.