It’s easy to misread anyone I suppose. Up until the fifth grade, I was extraordinarily quiet. I wouldn’t have put it that way, but that’s what they wrote on my report cards. My mother, not seeing anything to defend, replied, “When she has something to say, she’ll say it.” I sat beside her, cheeks flushed and smiling, I nodded. The teacher, once again misreading the room, looked at my face and said, “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.” My mother knew what the pink in my cheeks meant. “She’s not embarrassed, she’s hopeful.”
We ripen at different stages. I found my voice. I still get nervous. I get angry. I get tired. Sometimes sad. Sometimes so much joy that it’s overwhelming. And it all blushes out my heart and through my face, because through it all I am hopeful. I am hopeful that I will understand. That I will be happy. That I will pass on all that joy for others to carry.
Sometimes he looks at me and says, “Nice colors.” And I know he sees me. Just as she did.
I don’t often work in this color palette. But it suited her, my mother-in-law Lucy. Near the end, when time took to wrinkling, it was the pink of youth that said “not just yet.”
And maybe that’s the way for all. I hope so. I can feel it myself, that girlish vigor. From the pink of the gymnasium where we ran off our preteens. Cheeks, thighs, everything pinkened with beginnings. The blush remained through unanswered questions in classrooms to the bus stop, trying to time the line just right to sit next to the high scorer of the junior basketball boys’ team.
We grew and wandered under a blanket of rose. Beginning and beginning. Our hearts and minds must have sensed that all the change would bring with it challenge and heartache and pains of growth, but it was the pink that lifted us, the pink that held up the hand to our adulting years and whispered, “not just yet.”
I remember asking my grandma if it all went so fast. She giggled, partly because of the “of course” of it all, but mostly I like to think because most of the pink still remained.
I bought pink Lillies for Lucie. Placed them by her portrait. Not at her grave. But in the morning of the bathroom. She keeps beginning. Her palette remains.
