COLOR ME....

Crackpot?

This week is my third child (a daughter)’s birthday, and as she does each year, she drove to Maine from her home in New Hampshire and we had a birthday lunch, which always involves a lot of reminiscing, and a trip to a nearby garden center. It is very easy to find a birthday gift for this particular daughter because she is a passionate and fabulous gardener. And her birthday is in October. So off we go to stand in the Fall Bulb department and she says three of those, and twelve of that, and… This year she happened to feel the need of a lot of allium. Plus bearded iris. (Last year it was a zillion tulips.)

But this garden center also has a gift shop and while she was selecting her bulbs, I wandered over there and…ta DA! There were the candles I could not live without. Fat, thin, tall, short? Dripless? Beeswax? I don’t know. Didn’t matter. It was the color.

Here is one of my new candles, back in my home:

In order to explain (if in fact there is a rational explanation) why I couldn’t live without buying these candles, I have to go back to my childhood…elementary school years…in a small Pennsylvania town. Every Saturday I was given my allowance: a dollar. With my dollar I would walk to Woolworth’s, about four blocks from my home. Invariably I would spend my weekly money on paper dolls…they were a thing then…and, if a month had passed and a new one had appeared, a Little Lulu comic book. Lulu was something of a feminist who constantly got the better of her annoying male pals, Tubby and Alvin, and I admired her although I never fully understood the thing she wore on her head, which looked something like the bell that sat on my fourth grade teacher’s desk.

But I digress. Back to Woolworth’s, where I would make my small purchases, but I was settling for them, the 10-cent paper dolls or comics. because I could not actually buy the one thing that I yearned for, the thing that caused me to linger for long moments in the section of Woolworths’s that was not at all for children but for grown-up women. Women who sewed.

I stood for long moments in front of the Coats & Clark thread display. Yes: thread. The spools were arranged by color, in graduated shades…I want to say hundreds, but I suspect I am magnifying the magnificence, in the same way that I thought I remembered a hundred marble steps at the entrance to the public library in that town; when I returned as an adult to make a speech there, I realized there were only 10 or 12…cement.

There may have been 50 spools of thread. I was mesmerised by them. I wanted them. I even told my mother, when I was asked what I might like for my 8th birthday, that I wanted all of those spools of thread. My mother was always compassionate and understanding of my quirks, and perhaps we even talked together about the magnificence of the thread display. But it did not appear on my birthday, so I guess even she was perplexed by the strangeness of that request.

Many years later, as an adult, I fell into the same kind of bizarre reverie when looking at ads for pashmina scarves when pashmina became, briefly, a thing. And then…well, don’t get me started: the towel department at Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

It has to do with color.

See this? There, piled on top of the back of the couch, is a blanket that I once knitted. Standing in the yarn shop, choosing those yarns, was a little like being at Woolworth’s when I was eight years old.

And oh my…see in the background, that painting of sunflowers? That was a gift from the painter, my friend Ashley Bryan.

I remember my children, in kindergarten, one after another, all four of them…learning a song that concluded with “all the colors that we know….live up in the rainboooowwwww”

Ashley does too, now. Lives up in the rainbow. Awash in color.

I just went to Amazon and typed in COATS & CLARK and oh my goodness…they still exist. So: why not? I ordered some:

Taking up sewing? I don’t think so. But it’s like the candles: just to have, to look at.

Color me crazy.