1004---MAMMAW'S PINK HOUSE

Pink is my very favourite colour of all, I think.  I inherited this from my Mammaw, I’m sure, though perhaps it’s more my time of life and gentle taste, in the pinks and florals and pale pastels I love to surround us with in our home.

My Mammaw loved pink more than anyone I’ve ever seen---she planned their house for years before they tore down the old one and built the new one in its place, and had been gathering paint samples like baseball cards.

She and I would sit in the “swang” on that old weathered porch, our feet on boards which had been hewn back before the last century turned, when beadboard walls were always painted white, yellowing with time to a speckly umbrish shade with only the shapes beneath the pictures still harboring any imprint of the original paint.   We’d discuss the merits of salmon or shrimp or carnation, or baby and blush (though we’d none of us heard of “bashful” at that time), and we’d go in and stick a strip of pink squares onto a wall with a thumbtack, til the old house bore little strips of various shades dangling all over walls-not-long-for-this-world, just so we could see them in the light from all sides.     We both liked the idea of “shocking” in maybe pillows or edging on drapes, and we’d spend countless hours going back and forth over how they might look in the morning, or under a ceiling light in the evening.   

The new house, built in 1958, had pink asbestos siding, and the paint on the big concrete porch was almost the same hue.  

The living room and dining room were painted a rosy shade, to go with all the overblown roses on the linoleum, and the bathroom was a true pink, with pink ball-fringe on the curtains and dark-rose- sprayed-wicker shelves.  

A trio of those pompous little plaster wall-fish blew separate small pearly bubbles all up the wall above the tub.  I want to think that all the fixtures were that sort of ashes-of-roses shade, but neither Sis nor I  can remember, and think that my apt rose-colored-glasses remembrance of those times may be steering me too far.   It DID take  Mother several times to convince Mammaw how very tacky it would be to plaster flamingo decals around the edge of the tub and across the two mirrors.

A border of pink with little cooking  scenes ran around the kitchen ceiling, and there were lots of pink dishcloths and a set of glorious pink Melmac dishes.  I cannot imagine having such riches today---those rosy cups and plates and bowls with cheeks like pink satin.   I do believe that if I had such a set now, I’d be a much better homekeeper and counter-keeper and sink-tender, with those rosily lustrous dishes to spur me on to the next little chore, simply by their beauty and charm.   The remembering of them has been romanced onto a par with coveted doll-dishes and a pink scratchy dress for Easter---so glamoured over time that any food served on such pretty dishes would become ambrosia, and any drink, nectar from Fairy Stores.

Mammaw was persuaded to paint the one spare bedroom in a soft yellow, to go with the beautiful pale green curtains and chenille spread, but even that scheme backfired, when one of the vendors who’d supplied Grandpa’s shop for forty years brought them a gorgeous yellow-and-PINK striped blanket as a Housewarming present.

She lived on for twenty years or so in that charming pink house, content in the rosy shades of her life, and perhaps that’s why I’m so enamoured of pink---any shade, anywhere. 

Linking today to Beverly's PINK SATURDAY.