1002---SHADES

RED:

A REAL railroad caboose, a hatful of homegrown tomatoes, tiny strawberries peeping from between their lacy leaves, and their enormous full-ripe cousins on a pretty dish.  Proud lipstick, a flirty silk slip, a cheery kitchen counter, roses and ribbons and Valentine hearts.  Fire trucks and flags and majorette’s uniforms; a faraway balloon drifting in the sun, a stiff, petticoated dress on a tiny girl in white slippers, a sailboat far away on the sound, swimsuits drying over a porch rail.

BLUE 

Oceans and skies reflecting each other in endless colour, like mirrors marching the hall at Versailles.  Indigo is a luxury blue, a wrung-in-dyed-hands fabric, billowed and smooth in the drying.   It’s the deepest of sea-shades, with the purple depths of a thousand Mediterranean days.

Dragonfly blue is the shade of shining wings, iridescent panes of colour which flash like stained-glass windows as they sit, and become a blur of glass as they fly.

VIOLET

Small, unassuming flowers with the scent of Summer afternoons and the smooth faces of children uplooked in bright anticipation.  A wee bouquet in Grandmother's lapel vial, against a Sunday coat, and the clutch-wilted ones plucked by tiny fingers are the most beautiful of all. 

ORANGE 

Luscious peaches and tangerines and cantaloupes, the daintily-cut sections of fruit scattered onto crisp romaine, all the mingles of a sunset, an Autumn aspect of lush fiery leaves and great knobs of pumpkins dotting a field beneath a Hunters' Moon...

YELLOW is a rolling schoolbus, a cartwheel, a field of jonquils nodding in the sun, a #2 Ticonderoga just whirled through the sharpener and smelling of pine, ready for all the letters and words you want to write.

GREEN is a lush spread of ivy, the scratchy sound and smell of an ear of corn rent from the stalk, the hundred shades of afternoon lawn shadows, that last quiet calm ray as the sun sets over the sea, the honest, shining eyes of a four-year-old gazing at you with trust entire.

PINK is a softness and a whisper of powdery scent, the pale roses and candles on a little girl’s birthday cake, a thin, gauzy dress for a Summer day.  Pink is a feeling, I think, as much as a shade---it’s a cuddly hug, a laughing baby, a cold flute of champagne, a shimmer of flamingoes as they bend and delve in a pond, or take flight against the sky.