At the still point of the turning world

I am a winter hued girl. You may not know this about me. The combination of my light blonde hair, blue eyes and pink toned skin makes me look best in cool colors like ice pink and all blue tones and white, but not so good in colors like yellow, cream, bubblegum pink and other warm toned colors. I’ve known this for some time and I’m sure to some extent, it was some marketing campaign that taught me this to get me to throw out half of my wardrobe and buy new cool colored clothes. But I think it holds true. Often the shade of a pink shirt, as much as the style or the fabric, will either complement my skin tone and the blue of my eyes or clash with my natural tones. By genealogical odds, Finn is similarly colored and by some odd departure from his Mexican roots, James also has cool toned skin and eyes. We are a pale, blue eyed family.

This weekend, we painted the one room in our house, our bedroom that had not yet been painted at least once since we moved into our house 2 years ago. I painted it a darker blue-ish, grey-ish teal inspired by a t-shirt that my sister Meg gave James in a similar color. I really like it. I mean, this does not often happen. I usually buy paint by impulse and decide on a color that vaguely matches some color in my head that I saw in a magazine once and often looks not at all like how I imagined it would look. This is not always a bad thing. Our living room and Finn’s room ended up looking really great even though they came out far from the rooms of my imagining. Our kitchen, on the other hand is on its third paint color and I still hate it. This could have something to do with the fact that I generally hate our kitchen, the linoleum, the tendency towards grime and the mismatched cabinets. But all this is to say that I painted a blue room because it was a color I really loved on James and then as I looked around our house last night and saw the aqua of the front room, the various greens of the kitchen, Finn’s room and the library and the mud color of the entry and the dining room, (more of a grayish brown than a chocolate) I realized that our entire house is cool colored, painted in tones that would look good on us in a shirt. Maybe this is some subconscious desire to frame us all in a complementary light or maybe I have so trained myself to be drawn to cool colors in clothing, that I am now drawn to the same colors in paint. But either way, I have a very aqua and green house. I’m sure that in not so many years, these colors will be the mustard yellow and pea green of my parents generation, disgusting, overdone and out of style. I will have to move on to a new cool color; I am a winter after all. But I will be sad to see Aqua go.