This post is part of my 2022 Word Project. You can read what that’s about here.
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
5:03pm
My last color day was somewhere back in January, and the word was blue. So it’s high time for another one, and today’s color word comes courtesy of whatever phase I’m going through right now that makes it so appealing: green.
Could be the impending spring. Could be the fact that I saw a picture of myself wearing something not quite green but not quite yellow, and since I’m not a particular fan of yellow on any given day, green just stuck.
Could be that March was my grandmother’s birthday, and her favorite color was Kelly green. Not just any green. Kelly.
She would tell me about how she used to get dressed when she was young, and go out with her friends. Back in her day, girls wore dresses and hats and high heeled shoes and even gloves. Grandma most certainly never went out in a pair of Keds. I heard often about some of her lovely Kelly green outfits, hand made by her own mother.
Right before she left us for those Kelly green pastures in the sky, she went through a phase where she tried to give me her clothes. If you had seen the size of my grandmother… and the size of me… you would know how laughable that was. But that didn’t stop her from handing me shirt after shirt and saying, “Here, try this on,” followed immediately by, “You just need to lose a little weight.”
But I took a few of her things because it made her happy, and then I couldn’t get rid of them because it made me sad.
A few weeks ago when my brother visited and brought me a stack of my things from the attic in Brigantine, my grandmother’s shirts came with them. Funny enough, I did, in fact “lose a little weight”, and they fit this time.
One of the shirts was Kelly green.
It’s not often that a person wants to go around wearing their grandmother’s clothes, but in this case I think I will make an exception.
Green is not a hard color to find. It’s in the grass and trees and the leafy things at the Farmers Market. Some of the best things to eat in life are green, like Brussels sprouts and avocados, parsley, mint and cilantro, dill and baby spinach. All of which are currently gracing my counters and refrigerator shelves.
Do you know what I do not have in my house right now, not even one?
Limes.
I wanted to have one in today’s headline photo but there wasn’t even a piece of a moldy forgotten one to be found. I apparently squeezed them all for cocktails because I have a decent sized container of lime juice but no limes. And we’ve already established the new rule about going to the supermarket during the week, so I was not about to break it just for the sake of a lime.
So I took a picture of the green things on my desk instead.
One of the candles I bought is more of a minty seafoam green, with a bright, mint scent.
And the drawing of Brigantine that my nephew sent, complete with green palm tree leaves. There are no palm trees in Brigantine. I don’t even think there is a fake one. Just goes to show how ingrained the idea of palm trees and beaches is in our brains, even at sevenish years old.
There’s a green highlighter of course, and a bit of pale green woven into one of the several scarves my mother has knitted for Hello Kitty. The entire backdrop of my desk is a lime green felt board.
I noticed something interesting about green. It comes in big swaths. It’s all the vegetables or acres of grass. But it’s not as much an accent color, at least not in my immediate space. There are book covers in blue and pink and red and yellow. Stickers with red and blue and gray. Things from toiletries to pantry ingredients in rainbows of reds, blues, yellows, purples.
But green seems to wait until it can take center stage.
I have one sage green bathroom towel. A single lime green coaster. But no green earrings.
Five colors of spatulas, but none green.
Now, thanks to my grandmother and Amazon Prime, I have two green shirts but nothing else with so much as a green logo on it.
There is nothing printed in green, nothing colored in green, nothing edged in green.
But when I look out the window to my right, I see big, open fields of green, and when I look to my left, I see most of a wall of Alice-green.
The Alices are very green.
After my post about Alice the other day, my mother sent me a picture of Alice’s cousin. This one sits on a table in my mother’s house. Look at how green!
So green may not show up incidentally the way blue and red and pink do, but when it does show up, it shows up like it means it.
It turns out, too, that of all the myriad bottles in my bar collection, of all the contents in shades of brown and tan, beige, caramel, taupe, russet, walnut, umber and wood, sepia, burnt sienna or mahogany, only one bottle is a completely unique color: green chartreuse.
And a color with a personality like that is worth being celebrated.
Photo: one corner of my desk, where the fun stuff hangs out.