Pandemic Paint (Logan)

I’ve had a challenging relationship with red. Such anger and violence, medical pain and masculine gusto. Then again, there’s passion and flowers, Midwestern rust and Southern dirt. A primary power. A brand-new tricycle and a high voltage warning sign. Love. And hate. Dashboard lights.  

I’ve had a challenging relationship with my love. Such passion and anger, heart-exploding joy and devil-depression depths. Of course she left me. My world imploded, shrank. Then immediately threatened by the red spikes of the coronavirus, growing like moldy Lorax trees on a distant, tilting planet. Does the Lorax have state-issued isolation? I packed my lover’s belongings for intergalactic travel, I tilted at closeted windmills, I teletransported the bedroom. Then I found a paintbrush.

Two dozen years ago, I painted all the walls of this Tudor Revival a cool off-white. Let the posters, bookshelves, and rugs provide the color. But now I was lonely, short of breath. I incinerated the remaining contents of her office, slathered soothing Peace Yellow on three of the walls, and then let Monarch Orange fly on the fourth. It was like a garden bursting, an electric guitar wailing. I told a friend it was the most daring thing I’d ever done. “More daring than opening a bookstore?,” she asked. Yes, I answered, rushing to explore my new-found language.

I spent hours poring over a paint app on my phone, a virtual reality of red:green:blue ratios, color families, and Light Reflectance Value. I dreamed of deep, grainy earth tones and shaded primaries. I chose historic colors for my new bedroom, speaking with the Arts & Crafts creed to “work with the head, hand and heart to create health and happiness.” But I inverted the usual white-trim/colorful-wall approach with the deep Roycroft Copper Red on the woodwork, and mercurial Roycroft Misty Gray on the walls. I let the red windowsills breathe fire into the calm, chameleon gray, percolating with the light. I could hear the complementary colors singing like the tight harmonies of Quire.  

I extended the bedroom color palette to the exterior. House maintenance had been my partner’s territory. She painstakingly scraped the stucco, replaced rotten timbers, primed the wood shakes. The project stretched over a decade, each year strengthening the building’s core, yet each year yearning louder for aesthetic medicine.  

Today this house is being painted, by hired professionals in the middle of a pandemic! I’m sitting inside, windows covered in plastic, while the paint crew clambers all over the house, turning the flaking brown timbers to red, and the crumbling white stucco to gray. She would be aghast, but I let the boys do the work. This new color personality, not at all traditional, is lively and complex, serious and rebellious.

But, red? This is not my usual color choice. It’s too loud, too caustic. But then our world feels very red right now – full of danger and turmoil. We need the power of red to combat the pandemic, to control it. We’ll need red anger to stand for social justice too, and red passion to build a new world order. I will need a lucky, vital red to reconstruct my own small sphere.

So, to make peace with red. A quest for balance not just at home, but nationally and globally. What is balance if not health and happiness? Maybe I was missing a tool from my case of crayons. So, I’ve added the most powerful color to my squad. I hope that by embracing the power of red, I will find peace in that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I am healing. I am making peace with red.

Harriett Logan is an amateur lepidopterist and a professional bookseller. She started the former pursuit at age 8, and opened Loganberry Books at age 28, a quarter century ago.