Color stories, a creative writing and discovery prompt, continued....

now it's time for PURPLE!

First, thank you for your red stories! Let’s do it again with purple!

You guys, I was so blessed by your red (and blue) stories! Thank you for sharing them with me here, on Instagram, in messages and on Facebook. Sounds like the majority of you enjoyed the process. Some of us had similar memories, with some of the same childhood toys! And one friend shared she had to wrestle with it, but eventually came around to the color red. I love how allowing ourselves the mindful gift of meditating on a color can conjure up so many untapped memories.

After I posted my stories, I continued to have new red memories pop up. It’s funny how the brain works that way…that once you start asking for something, your memory will start giving it to you, and won’t stop just because you’ve moved on. I hope we can honor all of these color memories, even when we’ve moved on the next color, and at the very least, jot them down. Who knows, maybe we’ll do something with them at a later time.

If you were not able to join in for red, no worries, you can join anytime and you can always go back and do red whenever you have time. It truly has been a gift to me to recall some of these memories, so I hope you will experience this gift, too.

Now, are you ready for our next color? Purple!!

How to participate

I’d love for you to participate in any way you’d like or feel comfortable doing so. This is a no pressure creative writing prompt to explore how color shows up in the depths of our memories and sometimes, as we tap into memories, it stirs feelings we weren’t expecting. And these feelings may make you uncomfortable, delighted, surprised, emotional, and anything in between. So, you may want to keep the memories all to yourself, post and share them, post on your own social accounts and engage with your followers, or just post in the comments below. Feel free to post your stream-of-consciousness list or a story that came from one of the memories you identified through your stream-of-consciousness list. Most of all, I hope you’ll do what works for you, have fun with it, and give yourself some time to explore.

“I won’t eat any cereal that doesn’t turn the milk purple.”- Bill Watterson

My stream-of-consciousness list for purple

Mokey from Fraggle Rock (she was my favorite), my favorite purple winter boots with the purple fuzz that I wore all the time in elementary school, my mom’s amethyst necklace, my outfit choice for the Christmas performance at G.W. Carver, the shorts I loved most that JP also had a pair of, my purple car: KBEIGH, the grape hyacinth flower in our backyard, making tiny bouquets with violets, purple was always my color of choice when it came to school folders and notebooks but was so hard to find, San Rio Surprises purple plastic box and little erasers, My Little Pony purple castle and most of my favorite My Little Ponies had rainbow, turquoise and purple in them, the gray-purple milk after eating our sugary cereal, the fiberoptic sculpture Mamaw had in her WV house that glowed bright neon colors and the purple was always my favorite, my purple and pink ‘pump’ on the tongue basketball shoes, the singing Califorinia raisins and mom’s little figurines she had, the rubber grapes from Mamaw’s display-fruit bowl - which I had to chew in my mouth, Mamoo’s purple swivel chair in front of the TV in the living room, Mamaw’s spirometer, my stated “favorite color” for the longest time, one of my favorite crayons: periwinkle, the color of purple in the middle of a shell, I never liked the Flying Purple People-Eater song, my favorite shade of purple was Naomi’s Ugg boots when she was a toddler, for some reason: my friend Christy who lived in the neighborhood

Finding photos of vintage 1980’s My Little Pony ponies has been so exciting for me. This one, Glory, was one of my favorites! Photo courtesy of Etsy seller MasqueradesBoutique

This looks like it could have been about the same year as my Christmas performance in the story below. I’m pretty sure I would have worn purple every day if I could have.

“Time is purple just before night.” – Mary O’Neill

The Stories

I. Christmas Reds, Christmas Greens,….and Christmas Purples?

After rehearsal, the last thing Mrs. Cook told us before our big performance later that night, was ‘Wear your best Christmasy outfit!”

That night, the students at G. W. Carver Elementary School would perform their respective grade’s Christmas performances in front of all the parents and teachers. I had a solo that year. It was the first year, in second grade, they allow students to have solos.

Mom wanted me to wear the pretty Christmas plaid dress, hanging on a hanger over my closet door, with the usual white, opaque tights and the next-size-up black, patent mary janes to wear with it. But that’s not what I wore that night.

When the time came for the entire second grade to assemble on the stacked, metal bleachers, I stood out like a sore thumb. There I was among the sea of Christmas reds and greens, and plaids in head-to-toe purple, my favorite color. Purple boots with purple fuzz, over my purple cordoroy pants and my cornflower-purple sweater, with a white collared shirt underneath. I looked great.

I don’t remember the words I used to persuade Mom or the fight. Perhaps there wasn’t one. I just remember feeling great standing there to the side of the metal bleachers with Sarah and Caroline, my two other friends singing solos, and wearing their Christmas best. And when it was my turn to come to the microphone stand, Mrs. Cook smiled at me, and I smiled back as I took my position and belted,

“The shepherds feared and trembled when lo! above the earth, rang out the angel chorus that hailed our Savior’s biiiii-iiirth….”

I think purple made me sing better. That’s what it was.

II. What the Grape Hyacinth Did

I always believed I was supposed to live in a different time and place; a place with acres of green moors and fuchsia heather, and waist-high wildflowers with plenty of moss and fern-lined babbling brooks. Maybe my estate-like home stood in the background (if it did, it was insignificant), as I frolicked and skipped in an ethereal white dress gown, through boxwood mazes and rose gardens, playing all day among nature, befriending the animals and never getting dirty, before it was time to take my tea in the garden with my pinky lifted as I spoke in a British accent. Only in my mind and through the words I devoured in books had I ever been to a place like this, but I knew it was where I belonged.

I’d carry these places in my heart and through this romanticized lens and my vivid imagination, enter this dreamland through the convenience of my own backyard. Luckily, our backyard already had its charm, with a long trellis ‘hallway’ covered in leafy grapevines and muscadines, colorful, fragrant flowers, a cement birdbath and our rope hammock stretched between two large maples that supplied plenty of helicopters for my enjoyment.

One spring, our backyard lost a bit of its charm when my dad poured a small, concrete basketball court for my brother. It was unsightly to say the least, but it was tucked back in the corner of the yard, a corner we rarely used or visited prior to the court being built.

It was the court, then, luring me to that back corner, that was responsible for my discovery of a single purple flower, nearly hidden among the dark soil and weeds that never saw a blade, and stole my heart.

I had never seen something so delicate, beautiful and interesting that evoked such emotion. As much as I wanted to pick it and keep its beauty all for my own, I knew I couldn’t because there was only one. I excitedly dragged Mom out to see it, hoping she’d identify this mysterious, singular anomaly, standing erect and confidently attractive, among the ugly crowding weeds. She told me it was a grape hyacinth, and that day, grape hyacinth became my new favorite thing.

That weeded, dark corner, from where my fear of snakes had kept me away, had become the very place I’d get to experience wonder and delight, again and again, as I’d visit my new flower friend, crouching down, and gently pushing the weeds away from it to behold all of its charm. This one-stem beauty took me right to the heathered moorlands, and babbling brooks of my dream-homeland, where surely grape hyacinth grew by the thousands and I could pick as many as I wanted.

Nostalgia gifted me the opportunity to see that that flower meant more than one girl’s momentary delight. That sometimes when we overcome our fears and visit the dark spaces we’ve been afraid to explore, there is beauty to be found. And, even in the darkest, ugliest conditions, something beautiful can grow.

Those lessons came to me only while exploring this memory decades later, but that summer, I learned that not all beautiful things can belong to someone. Had I picked that one flower and put it in a vase to hoard its beauty for myself in my bedroom, it would have died in a week. Even in my childish wisdom, I knew that leaving it be allowed me to continue visiting and delighting in it with each visit. And I wonder if my understanding about that purple flower and that its beauty had to remain where it was planted, also gave me comfort knowing that perhaps visiting those heathered moorlands in my heart was indeed, the best way to enjoy them, too.

A watercolor sketch in my nature journal last spring also affirms that this flower will always remind me of the one in my backyard.

OK, I had to include this little trip down memory lane…

You guys, through my stream-of-consciousness list of purple, I felt compelled to research and find the My Little Pony playhouse that I played with for goodness knows HOURS upon HOURS! I loved my My Little Ponies and had a sweet little carrying case, a castle, all of the accessories, and this playhouse was my absolute favorite thing EVER.

And I found it!!! Eeeeeek!!! So exciting. Turns out it’s more pink than purple, but that’s OK. It’s called My Little Pony Paradise Estate (1986) and I found some pictures of it on ebay and etsy. Wow. Such an enjoyable trip down memory lane looking through these photos. I hope you guys have some moments like this with your color memories!

photo courtesy of Etsy

photo source here

photo source here

Here are more photos of the estate, in case you had this playhouse and want to take a trip down memory lane looking at it, too.

Enjoy!