“What’s your favorite color?”

“What’s your favorite color?“

 Frankly, I’m appalled at how utilitarian I’ve become when it comes to answering a question that took me half a second to answer when I was three – or 12.  Psychologists tell us that color affects our moods, emotions, and the decision we make.  That’s all good to know, I guess, but over-analyzing anything kind of puts a damper on my quotidian appreciation of it. Evidently there’s some merit to the theories: I’ve noticed I have one answer for what I wear, another answer for decorating my home, and it takes nothing short of a blazing orange Arizona sunset to remind me that it wasn’t always so.  There was a time I chose my favorite color based on raw sensation.  If you had asked a preteen me, “What’s your favorite color?” I would have told you in the blink of your cerulean eye, “Spring green!”

“Spring green” (in case you’re wondering) is a green that hasn’t yet had its fill of chlorophyll.  Like preteen girls, it’s still growing in its greenness.  It entrances a girl with its vivacity and hopefulness.  It’s the delicately pale vibrant green that slits the purplish-brown buds that knob up on tree branches, and then folds itself open to the waiting sunshine.  It reflects the sunshine.  It’s the color that awakes your eyes with butterfly kisses, beckoning them from the lethargic spell of winter’s browns and grays.

In one of the several houses I lived in when I was growing up, we had a room-size rug of short shag carpet that was mottled with hues of spring green and champagne.  It was the perfect realization of spring green.  In the living room where it covered most of a well-worn wood floor, there was a floral and geometric patterned stained glass window high on an east wall.  On clear mornings, whether there were snowdrifts up to the window sashes or crocuses blooming beneath the pines, beams of sunshine would come shooting through that window, pulling the glass’ colors down to dance on the carpet.  And though the carpet’s colors were magically transformed by the quivering burgundy, emerald and gold brought by the sun, they grew even more rapturous.  I loved to lay there in the warmth and color and let the beauty absorb all my preteen angst.

Now that I think about it, spring green could probably absorb a good share of my adult angst.   What about you?  What’s the “spring green” of your life?