On May 14th, my husband looked at the walls in the family room and said, “You wanna paint this room?” I seconded the motion and sang the Hallelujah Chorus, thinking this might be my only chance for a neutral color – anything but the putrid green that looked like somebody threw up the strained Gerber peas.
It was that color when we moved in a couple of years ago – okay, it was 2005 – and when we made an offer on the house, we in unison said, “The green is the first thing to go.”
It was not the first thing to go. A dog, four kids, two washers, and a microwave oven went before the green did.
But now, today, after 2 weeks of pulling nails out of the walls, another week of filling the holes and spackling, which sounds like even more fun than it actually is, two days of trimwork, a month of getting back to finishing that primer, and 72 lightyears standing at an endcap in Lowe’s agreeing on a corner piece – today, we’re painting the walls an actual color. Theoretically.
He unearthed the five-gallon bucket, I took one look at the shade, and said, “I don’t like it.”
“You don’t like it? You picked it out!”
“That was eons ago. It was in style then. I want something more pastel, more lightish. Go take it to that man that mixes up paint and tell him to put a gallon of white in it.”
“A gallon? It’s five gallons already! Where is he going to fit another gallon in this bucket? What do you think we’re painting, the Taj Mahal?”
“Well, somebody needs to!”
So he’s gone to the store. I was afraid to go along – afraid I would start looking at swatches again. You know, the paper things that look so inviting and colorful on the rack? But looking back, you realize that the day you were comparing them was the exact moment in time that you developed a nervous twitch, cross vision, and you’re pretty sure – rabies.
What gives? You walk in the store knowing you want a light lavender. You know, just lavender. Light. And you didn’t realize there were so many variations: pale plum, vintage wash, violet muse, and hey, look at this, I’m suddenly thinking about a mint green instead, but do I want cucumber pearl or desert mirage? I’m pretty sure about 42 trees died to provide the number of swatches I hauled home in the trunk.
Decisions don’t come easy for me. But they used to. That’s because in our early marriage, we were doing crazy things with our paychecks like paying off student loans and putting gas in the cars. There was nothing in the budget for changing the color of the walls. Paint was a whopping twenty dollars a gallon. You could eat a week on that.
So we’d comb the paint aisles of the store, hoping some miserable man had come in that morning returning paint, saying, “She doesn’t like it. She wants something more pastel, more lightish.”
They would reduce the price to five bucks a gallon, and we’d scoop down and abscond with it like an old cartoon where a fox grabs a money bag from the bank and parachutes down the Grand Canyon with turbo. Because after all, that paint was our favorite color, whatever color they had marked down to five bucks a gallon. “I’ve always loved gunbarrel gray,” we would console ourselves, “It conjures warm memories.”
I’m actually afraid it’s about to. I did inquire this morning, what would happen if I still didn’t like the color he comes home with. “It’ll be fine,” he assured me.
“Your next husband can paint it whatever color you like.”
Funny !