-A Study in Yellow-

I studied hairbows and Barbie dolls encased in their boxes when I was five, never decisive. Pink or purple or yellow? I was the unconventional girl child who ended up selecting the color yellow. It wasn’t that I had an aversion to pink or purple- in fact, lavender is my favorite color- but if a child psychologist could see within my mind and chose to analyze me, it was mostly due to the fact that I associated yellow with sunshine and sunflowers, lemonade and car wash parties my uncle would throw for us to get all dressed in our swimsuits to wash his canary-yellow car at the time, though as I look back several years later I honestly wonder if all the hype was just to get his car washed.

            I painted my half of the bedroom yellow shortly after our seventh move in the first twelve years of my life in an effort to recapture the yellow shades I had recently recalled and mourned in my first bedroom, one my mother painted and allowed me to cover a whole wall with handprints, paintbrushes, anywhere and anytime. Big Bird from the children’s television show Sesame Street made his way on there more than a few times, along with sunflowers and fairies. Apple and lemon trees also appeared. This wall gave me my supposed artistic eye and joy in creating bold messes now; I’m almost positively sure of it. And it’s probably also the reason why my little self designed my future child’s bedroom with that golden color in mind- I still want to paint it that way.

            On my eighteenth birthday I asked for yellow flowers, and woke up to bouquets of them all over the house- daffodils, sunflowers, daisies, yellow roses. Even now, I associate yellow with joy, brought to me by soaking up the sun during a hike along with countless other out-of-door activities. There’s a certain sense of contentment that comes with that gratefulness surrounded by joy. If someone invented yellow lattes, I would undoubtedly partake- just so long as they didn’t taste of bananas. As I grew up, I needed those sparks of color in what could at times be a colorless world. I painted my yellow wall white a few years after painting it yellow, and didn’t miss it; because now I see myself as the yellow in what could be a fairly black-and-white kind of world swirled with uncertainty. If people can continue calling me a sunflower, I know it’s enough.