Passports. They’re important.
Anything with a stamp or a notarization given by someone in
uniform is most likely important. Often, we keep these documents locked and
hidden because they make us nervous. Yes, a piece of paper or a little booklet
or a number holds the power to send a mind into a fit of anxiety. How absurd is
that?
A few weeks back, I ran into a previous home to
retrieve one of these documents. This home was a different home. Someone
painted the walls different colors—lovely colors, but different colors.
Colors. They’re important too.
My childhood best friend lived in a house down the street
from me. I spent a good portion of ages 5-12 walking down the street between
these two houses, excited to see my friend and excited to see her house. Her
father is a graphic artist and, as a result, the house’s colors changed
constantly. My friend and I would get off at the bus stop together and walk
into a different home on a regular basis.
Until I walked into my own home on that same street—now, a
slightly different home—I hadn’t realized what a shock colors could be.
Colors—they’re something entirely ordinary, but extraordinary when they are so
deeply entrenched in our perceptions and identities.
My childhood friend eventually moved to a home in a
different city, but later I got accepted to a college in that city. Sometimes, she gets off at a bus stop that’s not far from my house. We don’t
live in homes on the same street, but it’s something close.
And now, I have my passport in some location somewhere. One
could say it has its own home. My passport is blue, a friend’s is red, and
another friend has more than one passport. They’re all important, but not as
important as the meaning that we give them.
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| Photo by Christina Kohler |
I scribbled something about colors in a field notebook in
Knysna, South Africa last summer. The assignment was to sit, to watch the
sunset, and to write until it became too dark to see the page. If you’re
interested, this is it in electronic form:
As she looked upon the mountains in the
distance and the sun setting over the clouds and the fruitful valley beneath
her, she thought about all of the colors. They seemed to form a subtle
gradient, each peak a darker green, then blue, each cloud fading from gold to
peach to white.
It reminded her of the day her parents came
home with a bundle of paint swatches and she was asked to pick just one color
for the four walls of her room. She always loved all colors, and she begged her
father to let her choose many. When her request was denied, she settled on a
color called Sunset Rose. Her friend told her, “It’s impossible to be sad in a pink
room.”
Today,
she noticed a bit of Sunset Rose peeking between the descending clouds and the
mountains below them. She compared it to all of the other colors around her—the
dark green of the pines, the smoky blue of the mountains in the distance, the coral
red of the aloe flower beside her, the golden light of the falling sun. She
didn’t know what color she would choose today, for all of them were
magnificent.
When
the laughter of the Hadeedah birds echoed over the valley, she thought about
what color it would be, if colors could represent sounds. Because these birds
woke her before dawn that morning, she decided it would be an ugly color.
As
she watched plumes of white smoke cover the valley, she thought about how
people were always trying to take away the colors. They were taking away the
emerald of the yellowwoods and they were diverting the sapphire of the grand lakes back home. She wondered if the world was asking her to choose just one
color.
She really did not want to choose.
