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Heart of the Mountain Eww! It’s yellow!” Mom shuddered and walked around the kitchen checking the cupboards and appliances and making mental notes about the place. We trailed her as she ventured into the near dining room. “And this is yellow, too. How ugly.” Mom was right. It was an ugly yellow even to my senses, and I was a mere ten-year-old. Little did I know that these rooms and an earlier event in my life would lead me to Dad offered, “Maybe it wasn’t selling in the store.” The store. Below us was the store. When Dad knew he was being transferred from the Rhode Island plant back to Wellsboro’s Corning Glass Works, he jumped at the chance to buy the old family store in Holiday from his Uncle Bert White. Dad had pleasant memories there. The store was built by his grandfather, Dick Keeney, around 1900, long before Dad was born. The store sold food, dry goods, hardware, gas, and other general merchandise a small farming community might need. It also sold paint, which, in those days, came premixed and only in a few basic colors. While Dad worked at the plant, Mom would “run” the store. We’d live above it in the large apartment. Dad had it all figured out. Life would be surrounded with family and neighbors whom we already knew. Dad was a drafting engineer and one of his passions was drawing. He loved mixing oils or pastels and setting them on canvas. He also painted signs as a sideline business and for fun. I loved looking over his shoulder while he drew those magical shapes, and lettered signs like “Open Saturdays only,” or “Angleworms for sale.” The words seemed somehow strnage to my young eyes. One evening, when I was about three, my baby sitter urgently called my parents home from the Arcadia Theatre. I’d ventured into Dad’s stash and opened a can of oil-based and very PennDOT-yellow paint. I’d also opened a shoebox full of colorful bird feathers he kept to tie flies. My parents found me sitting on the floor in my pink pajamas in a puddle of paint, a coating of yellow smeared from head to toe. I was industriously picking feathers off one painted hand only to have them stick to the other. I can still see that horrid shade of yellow. For most of my life, I dodged yellow when it came to dresses, curtains, bedspreads, or wall color. It wasn’t until I purchased my last home nine years ago and wanted to find a color for the wall of a small room that I turned to a shade of pale butter. You see, I had a Dad who literally colored our world with paint. It was on the furniture and walls. On those he added decorations, signs, or murals. After painting the store’s exterior, he painted a huge sign on top of that. He just couldn’t stop. He painted on driftwood and drew landscapes on Mom’s wooden salad bowls and spoons; he put eyes on fishing lures. He was the first in the area to paint with fluorescent and phosphorescent paints, using them in both his signs and paintings. I even found an old teenage photo showing his custom painted first car. Dad didn’t consider it work but play. And isn’t “play” fun? Playing like that is what I enjoy today, thanks to Dad. I’ve never feared color or putting a vibrant or unexpected or unusual shade of paint on a wall in my house. “Life with Father” took care of that. From him I learned, “If you don’t like it, you can paint over it.” He would have agreed with what they say on HGTV: “Paint gives you the best bang for your buck in reinventing your space.” Once my living room was painted amethyst for two weeks, until I calmed it down with a soft beige. Even my son-in-law, Duane, remarked one day, “Don’t sit too still around Pat, or she might paint you.” It took some time for those yellow walls to disappear over our store. The first one to go was the kitchen. It was replaced by a shade of what I called Pepto-Bismol Blue, had the medicine been blue and not its trademark shocking pink. This chalky, bland blue that Mom loved made a stark difference from the yellow still in the other rooms. But, eventually, every trace of yellow disappeared from our home. Meanwhile, I grew to dislike the blue kitchen because of the emotions it raised in me. I began to weary of my mundane chores—doing the dishes, taking out its garbage—and figured I had to do them because mothers didn’t like to do them. I eventually grew to dislike blue, too. So, for over the next fifty years, blue was missing from my home color palette, too—that is, until his past month. Winter always brings my thoughts and energy inside. I begin to scrutinize my surroundings and dream of altering my rooms in the most inexpensive way I know. Who doesn’t like to see those nicks, dings, nail holes, and marks disappear? I began to plot, plan, and imagine. And my imagined makeover, which included blue, was so much grander and much easier to accomplish than it would in reality. A dear, old friend, an art professor, once told me, “At some point we begin to crave the color we have been ignoring.” Seems deprivation or overindulgence will cause us to look differently and anew at our color choices. Perhaps that’s why I finally chose blue. As I paint, I realize painting is one of my forms of meditation. While my body is on overdrive with the project at hand, I go inside my head and try to work out my life the best way I know how. I repaint my hopes and dreams, brush out some rough spots, clean out the garbage of extraneous “stuff” going on in my head, and fill in the holes I tend to neglect. Sometimes I even start humming. I often recall these Michael Stewart’s lyrics from the musical Barnum: The colors of my life are bountiful and bold. Pat Davis facilitates memoir writing workshops and is a professional musician. Contact her at patd@mountainhomemag.com |
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a lifetime of shunning yellow from my color palette. Mom continued walking into the living room and glanced in a couple of bedrooms. She whirled around and said, “The whole place is yellow,” 
