It’s as inevitable as Colorado tulips getting crushed by snow.
Each spring, and I mean every single time the planet circles back to this stretch of the universe, my wife, Melody, gets seriously worked up. If you’ve been married or shacked up with someone as long as I have, you know what I mean.
I can see it in her eyes when I get home at the end of a day that’s now noticeably longer. We have fresh asparagus with the fish. We splurge on the Sancerre in real glasses instead of Tupperware sippy cups. She gets closer. She leans in and whispers in that soft, breathy springtime voice, “I want to paint the living room.”
My own springtime response is equally predictable.
“Oh, God, no. Anything but that. I’ll caulk windows. I’ll trim trees. I’ll clean the basement.”
Actually, no, I will never clean the basement. It’s too far gone. I’ve gone down there a few times in the last few years with the very real intention of thinking about cleaning the basement some day and realized I’m not enough of a man to do it. I will die here and bequeath more than 20 years of tax records, bike tires, pails of hardened drywall mud, unplanted vegetable seeds, broken bathroom fixtures, smoke-detector batteries (So THAT’S where those were) and never-used, do-it-yourself car-buffers, tuck-pointers, drain un-cloggers, and car-headlight-lens-descuffers, to the next owner after they drag my mortgaged corpse away.
Immediately, Melody wants to know what my schedule for departing this world might be so she can choose a color to paint the dining room without my commentary.
She wants to express her primal link to the vernal rumblings of Gaea in infinitely similar shades of what I would call, “white.” I, on the other hand, understand the real fleeting nature of spring. This alluring and tantalizing time of year means one thing: spring skiing. And nothing spoils a romp in Colorado’s best snow of the year like plans to paint with what looks just like last year’s powder-flat selection.
Melody loves to paint. She loves everything about it. The research on color trends, swatches, color science, swatches, color research, lighting, and more swatches. I see these things in strategic places around the house. Swatches of “Polar Bear,” “Moonrise,” and “Mirage” each deflowering a wall. They’re like graffiti tags from a gang of Martha Stewart hoodlums, signaling that they’ll be back, and this wall is theirs.
“Cosmic Dust” has clearly marked territory in the foyer. But so, too, has “White Willow,” the interloper. I sense a battle brewing. Clearly, though, anything named “White Willow” doesn’t stand a chance. My money, lots of it, and my lost ski days are on “Cosmic Dust.”
In my next life, I want to name colors of interior wall paint. I’ve often wondered which came first, the “Chicken Down” or the “Barnyard Eggshell?”
I mean, does someone look at falling snow and think, “Eureka! We must create an interior, satin-finish paint precisely this color.” In that case, who gazes at a cut “Parsnip” and thinks, “Every bathroom in America will die to look like this.”
No. Some schmuck adds a little of this, a little more of that, paints it on endless paint chips and sends them to the marketing department for a name.
I could do that. No more “Misty Mom” or “Myth.” I mean, seriously, “Misty Mom?” What is that? Maternal tears? A scratchy black-and-white photograph? How about this for moving the process along?
“Sparkling Spring” would be named, “Light Gray.” “Offshore Mist”? That’s now, “Darker Gray.” And everyone’s favorite, “Sorcerer”? The easy-to-understand, “Light Black.” You’re welcome.
I imagine that my wife, who’s an artist, agonizes over the names more than she does the infinite shades of white. She can stare at three chips of what are probably the same color but with different names with all the trepidation I do when trying to decide, “pretzels and cream cheese, yesterday’s half-eaten coconut-maple doughnut or the forgotten Halloween candy my daughter hid from me so well even she forgot where it was?” In the interest of full disclosure, I know I’ll eat all those things, it’s the agonizing over which to eat first that I equate to Melody’s color-crisis.
And selecting which white is the winner is only the beginning. After that comes the shopping. It’s not just a gallon or two of paint. It’s gallons of paint and dozens of rollers and brushes and drop cloths and tape and everything that we’ve purchased dozens of times before. But all that is somewhere in the basement and, well, let’s not go there.
Here’s where it really gets ugly. About the time I’m watching the register clerk look fruitlessly for bar codes on drop cloths, I realize I’m not going to be skiing for a long time. My pals, who’ve sneaked out of the house before their wives even woke up, are now SnapChatting me pictures of knee-deep bliss. I start to panic and grumble.
“Don’t worry, I’ll do all the painting,” Melody says. “I just need you to help me get it ready.” She’s frowning because she’s already tired of my whining and now regrets her choice of “Dream Catcher” over “Prelude.”
I’m nobody’s fool. The washing, the moving, the taping, the cutting in when you really want to be cutting out are the worst parts. Strutting the roller around the room is a cinch. The whole thing makes me sigh a lot. I sigh in shades of “Mineral Water” and “Cloudy Day.”
So I tape. Melody takes the tape off because it’s not perfect. It’s the artist thing again. I try to explain to her that I think and paint outside of the box. I get “the look.” I hate the look. I get texts from my pals. They’re having beers for lunch and the snow has never been better. My mood becomes “Old Vine.”
Resigned, I paint all the ceilings and get paint everywhere, because that’s my job. We make three or four more trips to the store, two for more supplies and the final to get a different color entirely. Who knew that “Orange Zest” would be pretty damned orange when you got it up on the wall?
My pals are having beers in a mountain bar now as we take the last of the tape off the baseboards.
“See?” Melody says in accomplished smugness. “It completely changes the room.”
I don’t see it. It’s like trying to discern the difference between sunlight at 2:47 p.m. and 3:02 p.m.
OK.
But it’s spring, and a better mood is in the air. I’m glad she likes the all-new color of white. I wrap my arms around her, and whisper in a breathy voice, “You wanna go make some turns?”
And looking for a new area rug instead of skiing, because the old one totally clashes with the new white, I’m outta here.
Hahaha…. i thought this only happened at my house.
You are awesome, as usual.