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.