I suppose we’ve all done it, judged the water’s temperature by the color. Without so much as a toe dipped in, we can be lured by the gentle turquoise blue of a sunlit sea, or just as easily stepped back by the darkened grays of wave rocked waters. Maybe it’s experience, or maybe the heart was and is the only thing capable of forgetting all the grays of lessons learned, and still able to feel the true temperature of our surroundings.
Seeing him draped in the colors that only the south of France can produce — the colors that poets and painters alike have tried to capture — it was easy to see the warmth. Easy to fall in love. But to see these colors still, colors that neither time nor Midwestern winters could dull — this, I suppose is the real measure.
Maybe it’s true for all things, once you see it with your heart. The yellow-green of sun lit trees that I recently painted in two portraits — I can’t unsee it as I walk along the path – it is everywhere. And I smile in the face of all that green, as familiar as the neighbor who walks his beagle twice a day, the two men who only stroll on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, or the biker in his NY baseball cap. They are all yellow-green.
And then I return to the true-blue love of the one I married. Only and always, even on the cloudiest of days, in this most open of blues. My eyes grin at the color my hands try to recreate on the canvas. My heart nods, knowing only its connecting beat could produce such a color. Such is the temperature of a welcoming home.
