Purple Reign

I liked every color as a kid. I loved green and white. I didn’t really know how I felt about purple until I visited Oregon for the first time, July 4, 1973. Then it reigned.

Although I did have a purple bike I loved. The bike is what I loved most, and it came in purple.

My grandmother always hated purple. When I was a child, she would always hate to see me cold and would make it clear, in a very disapproving tone, that my lips were purple. Not cold. Purple.

I thought the purple thing had to do with me getting cold, but years later, she had a cataract removed and called me in a panic. She was so upset at this vase that she had always seen as a cool, dark charcoal. Now that her vision had been unveiled, she was shocked and in horror that she had been living with purple.

She was always afraid of the sea, and living in Puerto Rico, her feelings were known every day as I headed to the beaches of San Juan. You see, she had seen a tourist drown as a child, and when they pulled the body out of the water in front of her, it was purple.

From then on, she just didn’t like to look at purple. Like many Catholics of her generation, she associated purple with mourning and death, right up until the day she died. A combination of culture and experience shapes our color associations later in life.

However, she never said a word when Santa delivered my purple bike: a sparkling purple bike with a white plastic banana seat and handles, psychedelic flower stickers included.

Nature intends to deliver us from our own color prejudices so we can do the same thing in our own lives. We might not want or like a color, but we can visualize how colors can look beautiful together because of nature.

Puerto Rico is summer year-round. Puerto Rico is summer year-round. The only time I noticed purple growing up was in a sunset, which is predominantly orange.

Then I visited Oregon for the first time. I understood why orange and purple go hand in hand.

I was 12 when I visited Oregon for the first time. My mother divorced, remarried, and moved, hoping I would want to come along. I gave it a go when she promised she would buy me an entire new wardrobe to start 6th grade in the fall.

We went to Kmart. The racks were full of fall clothes, which I had never seen before. Bonus, there was a thing called layaway.

Fall, a season I had never known or explored, is associated with the color orange thanks to leaves, pumpkins, harvest hue, and a honey-mellow sunlight that takes over nature as it prepares to wind down, rest, and restore for the winter.

I walked in and found the perfect purple fall outfit, as in Donny Osmond’s signature color. Yes, I was one of those teenage girls who attended a Mormon church with a friend, hoping Donny might attend.

The pants were made in a deep purple corduroy. The shirt was a cool lavender, woven unitard with snaps, short sleeves, neck and sleeves trimmed with a white threaded edge.

I lasted six months in Oregon before I went back to Puerto Rico to live with my grandparents. When it was time to go to college, I permanently moved to Oregon, just in time for Prince to make purple reign again in my life.

When Isaac Newton showed that color did not belong to objects, but to light, he must have been talking to the non-purple.

Non-purple people want purple if it is a thing. Think plums, wines, eggplants, blackberries, amethysts, lavender.

Purple people want purple. This is why they love purple walls. Walls are never a thing. They are a color.

Purple is associated with two sides of the same coin, although people often think they are opposites. Royalty, nobility, luxury, and power. Or spirituality, wisdom, imagination, and mystery. Child-bright Barney purple. Or morose, somber darkness.

Purple reminds us that duality does not come from opposition. It comes from oneness. Two things that contrast but don’t conflict. Life can only be defined by death.

Until I made my climb to self-actualization with a bucket of paint, I had no idea that purple, a color associated with intuition, sight, wisdom, sobriety, and compassion, was the very same thing my grandmother strived for. The ideals she wanted to live.

She had a relationship with purple, a duality that is often described as love and hate are two sides of the same coin. No in-between.

The book The Color Purple gets its name from a quote that states it "pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it."

That is what makes purple abundantly clear. It cannot be ignored.People who hate purple will give you many reasons why they hate it. People who love purple will never give you a reason why they love it. They just do. They do not have to explain why. It is evident to them that you are the one who misunderstands the color.

Here is the thing.

Some colors do not ask for permission. They reveal what is already true.

When my youngest daughter was born, she was born as a purple lover, and I fell in love with purple forever because of her. I get to live a dual history of my grandmother and my daughter through this shade.

Coloring is an act of belonging. You are the palette.