The Color Pink, All Grown Up

“Daddy, why do we have to have a pink house?’’ the girl had asked for the bazillionth time of the screaming wood frame structure on the corner of Cherry Street. “Your mother likes pink,’’ would be her father’s short unrelenting reply.
“It’s embarrassing. My classmates make fun of it.’’ She would whine. “Too bad they don’t know how special it is,’’ he would firmly say. The girl knew the nonconforming overpowering carnation pink color, the crayon in the box she had grown to hate, would cover the house for the long haul. She also knew that sharing her Dad’s explanation with friends would be even more awkward.
She had lived for more than a decade in the 1950s two-bedroom double shotgun on cinder blocks, a home her parents had had built the year she was born. Now that junior high had arrived, she could hardly contain her humiliation. Her parochial school was on the other end of the block, and each day her classmates would walk home from school, passing by 626 North Cherry Street, staring and asking, “Why do you live in a pink house?’’ Some would snicker, some would whisper behind her back at school, “She lives in a pink house.’’
By high school, her Dad had grown weary of the constant question. Either that or her parents were tired of the color. The girl’s family also had grown, and her father remodeled and enlarged the house and at last painted it white to complement the other wooden and brick homes on the paved street that held the lives of 20 or so working class families.
The teasing stopped as teenagers’ memories of the pink house faded. And the little girl, now practically grown up, proudly walked up and down the concrete front porch steps and sidewalk to and from the ends of Cherry Street.
If only she had known then what she knows now, sophisticated things like the meaning of pure love and the power of personal preference?
Four decades later, when she would grow up and read about the “Pepto-Bismol’’ pink house in The Secret Lives of Bees, there would be an instant appreciation for its anachronistic appeal. Author Sue Monk Kidd set the stage for the poetic aptness of the dwelling’s color. The girl, now a woman, couldn’t imagine a more perfect staging for the Boatwright sisters whose mother had bravely named them August, May and June.
There had been an epiphany long before the novel about the beekeepers. Fifteen years earlier the girl from the pink house had been awed by the sight of the colorful Victorian cottages lining streets of historic Oak Bluffs, Massachusets, on Martha’s Vineyard.
A "lifetime'' before those two events, the girl, by then a young woman, had gone home to visit her father only to find that he had painted the stark white house a striking canary yellow with forest green trim. Her mother had passed away by then.
Overcome with curiosity, she felt compelled to ask, “What made you paint the house, Dad?’’ His reply was characteristically brief.
“I did it for me. I like color.’’

(PHOTO ILLUSTRATION of Oak Bluffs, MA cottage : Jean Nash Johnson)

(SKETCH: Michael R. Johnson)