Yellow

She doesn’t like the color yellow. No, actually the color by itself is fine. Yellow is quite nice when looked at impartially, a little bright for her taste, but that is more a question of tone. It’s too bad that over the years, yellow has gotten a bad rap. Crayon suns and the smiley face are the two biggest culprits, with smiley probably doing more damage single-handedly than all the lesser images put together. Then there is the cowardly “yeller,” which she doesn’t know the origins of but doesn’t really count, it not being about the actual color, and anyway isn’t that a cowboy thing?

Yellow is the cheerleader, always the bright one of the bunch. All the other colors probably snicker behind yellow’s back, feeling slightly guilty because they are not the colors that decorate the children’s ward at the hospital. Not blue, not green, and certainly not red. Only yellow, candy-striper yellow, after-school volunteering yellow. The paler you go, the more goody-goody you get, from sunbeam right down to creamy lemon.

She can’t help but be biased by all this. For instance, she has no yellow clothing. Not a mitten or a t-shirt, not a crazy patterned sock. Yellow offends her with all its happiness, the blind kind, thrown in her face.

But go the other way; now that is interesting. Perhaps there are hidden depths to yellow, things you would never suspect. Go darker, and yellow possesses everything that the rest of the colors are lacking. Luminescence, a melancholy glow. A fading ahhhh into silence, that is gold. Not the shiny kind, but the kind that you suspect you can wipe away in thin layers. The dull gold of aged appliances, of long-dead birch leaves, of ribbon-thin rushes snapping in the wind.

The real depth of gold is not the yellow. It is the film that is draped over the yellow, like colored clay that’s been glazed. A thick ceramic mug, warm and heavy, filled with broth and too big for your young hands, your senses still intact, focused on the touch of the world.