The Wild Thang

I remember color meant so much to me as a child.

The first house I loved in,

red kitchen

turquoise armchair (the one our cat loved)

green stairs with yellow polka dots (I’m not kidding)

dining room wall my mother painted to look like a fiery sunset-

orange, yellow, red.

And outside?

BIG purple

with blue

and yellow

and orange

and green.

(yes, this was a real house)

(not a house I am dreaming up)

The other kids in the neighborhood called it “The Barney House”

like the dinosaur

but I never watched that show so

I thought that was a silly thing to say.

the best part?

we had a van to match.

“The Wild Thang”

was her name

Volkswagen princess

decorative pink pillows in the back seat

with peace signs

I have this memory of a tiny bright green inchworm

on that seat

crawling nowhere

on *my* seat.

When my sister was born, we sold our princess

I woke up one day

looked out my bedroom window,

the street was empty.

I mourned her absence

so little to grieve so big

like I’d lost someone dear

she’d moved away

or she’d died.

That was probably the first time I experienced resentment toward my sister,

for banishing The Wild Thang.

but she didn’t know,

Nobody knew.

My favorite color growing up

was Green.

Not because I liked to wear it

I didn’t paint my nails or my bedroom walls that color

but because it was everywhere

in grass and trees and fields and flowers

Maybe it seeped through the cracks of my psyche

and claimed me

and I know I liked that

it meant LIFE

it meant KIND

and EARTH

and CHANGE

now I like that it means GO.

Non-violence is in my blood

when I was ten I realized eating chicken meant eating a thing that had a life

and there was no going back

It’s funny because it doesn’t even feel like I had a choice

the gentleness is not voluntary

but it’s something deeply loved.

I remember running barefoot in the summer

in our small backyard

staining my feet blue

with fallen berries from some kind of tree

washing my feet in a bucket

the water now the-dyed

picking deep-red almost-purple raspberries off wildly overgrown bushes

in my grandmother’s backyard

the block smelled like lilac

when those flowers blushed in spring, in her yard

(she lived directly across the street)

(in a white house her grandfather built)

(it used to be a butcher shop)

(isn’t that ironic)

and when we moved away

our new house was blue and then orange

and that was just okay.

Planned communities creep me out

every house

derivative of the one next door

and being born into so much color

is probably why.

Green is my favorite color still

but for different reasons

like when you’re tiny tiny

you can’t just step off a step

you have to bend your knees and jump

while everyone else just steps

but then you get big

and it’s like, Woah-

that was a huge drop

and I had no clue.

but it was gravity all along

and the color was around me all along

bathing me

entering me

sculpting me

and finally I’m alive to it

the full spectrum

when I least expected it