Local Color

There was a day over the past winter when I was stuck in my house by bad weather. My apartment has white walls and beige carpet, outside the windows the world was covered with white snow and the sky that day was the same color. So I started feeling like I was trapped inside a plain white box. I think I might have mentioned it in a previous post.

When my sister started unpacking my stuff and putting it away around the house, my colors came back. My decor has always been lots of rich multi-colors, set off by black. I first noticed this in my Junior year of college, that the look of my room was characterized by my books and my albums. Because of the kind of books I read, I guess, my houses always seem to have lots of stripes of bold, primary colours, and I always have some kind of black furniture surrounding them - bookcase, stereo cabinet, etc.

Now that (some of ) my books are on the shelf above the kitchen pass-through and my kitchen things are set around the counters, it's starting to look like me here. In the bedrooms she put books along the shelf by the window in the guest room, and in a lovely Mission-style small bookcase from Target in the master bedroom, and those books visually anchor the rooms and balance them. It used to be that the rooms dissolved off into the distance with their white walls, the same colour as the white snow outside. Now the dark color of the furniture by the doors is echoed by the dark colours of the books at the edges. The rooms probably look a bit smaller, in the great scheme of things (smaller than infinite dissolving whiteness out to the horizon - yeah, a little bit smaller than that), but they make a definitive statement, and now look like "me".

Meanwhile, out in the Nature, the snow is still there but melting, and the sun is getting strikingly higher in the sky. I can't believe how fast it's changing, but I suppose if it has to go from 4:15pm sunset at one solstice to 10:30pm sunset at the other one, it has to move pretty fast every day. This change also changes the color of the sky, when the weather is sunny, from a washed out light pale whitish blue to a deeper blue. The main colors over the past few weeks have been white on the ground, this slightly deeper blue above, and then a row of brown trees between. I noticed these bands of color one afternoon when I walked out of work in a knitting frame of mind, and was bowled by their beauty and wanted to depict them in some knitting or art project. And then the next day a guy at work who is prone to wearing pastel sweaters was wearing an outfit with exactly the same colors - white Dockers, dark brown belt, light blue shirt. I almost stopped him and remarked on it, but stopped myself because I would have sounded like a lunatic and also because it's inappropriate to remark on the clothing or physical appearance of one's co-workers.

Now, a few weeks later, on my morning commute, just as I pass over the 441 bridge where it would be impossible to slow down and take a photo much less stop, walk out and regard - the color scheme is just crazy beautiful. That same row of brown trees but beneath, a deep blue of the now melted Fox River. Bands of light blue, grey and tiny hints of sunrise-pink in the sky. The grey highway stretching out before me. Everything a bit metallic and reflective because of the open water. Just crazy beautiful, and it makes my heart soar every time I see it.