Sage Green, or Why Little Boys Only Get Eight Crayons

My wife is a decorating genius. Our home, which we built in 2000, has become in the past four years her canvas upon which she's worked her magic. The first big project was painting our bedroom. She spent the entirety of spring break 2001 doing something called "faux painting," which involved several gallons of creamy yellow latex paint, a gallon or so of something called "glaze" (which, I assume, has little or nothing to do with Krispy Kremes), and One Major Law:

DO NOT
COME IN
THE BEDROOM
WHILE I
AM PAINTING.

There should have been some sort of Dantean "woe unto ye who enter here" sign above our bedroom door. For that whole week, my little wife (she's 5'2" - forgive the seeming sexism) climbed up and down our 8-foot Werner aluminum ladder, clutching a glaze brush in one hand, a bowl of mixed glaze and paint in the other, with a second brush gripped in her teeth, and proceeded to cover all the walls of our bedroom with intricate, crisscrossing strokes, once with the paint brush, once with the glaze brush, then back over again with the glaze brush...covering every square inch of wall with paint and glaze, which created a stunning, textured look somewhat akin to what one might see in a centuries-old Italian villa (or at least your local Olive Garden).

Encouraged by her success, she rested for about a year and a half, then enlisted the aid of Hanna, our Ukrainian exchange student, to do the same to our nursery, but this time in a light purplish color. (She tells me it's "lavender." More on this later). Again, another beautiful accomplishment by Katrina - the room is certainly stunning. (Poor little Hanna couldn't raise her arms for two days).

Hanna went home in June of '03, and we embarked upon a radical makeover in the house. The biggest change was getting everything organized...wanna know where to find brass cup hooks in our house? Why, certainly! They're in the third drawer of the second row of the organizer hanging over my workbench in my garage! Organization, organization, organization! That's my thing!

Katrina's thing is painting walls.

Which brings us up to speed on the title of this post.

See, we live in a two-story house in the Pacific Northwest. We don't get a great deal of sunshine here, so houses are built in extremely open designs with lots of windows, to afford the least likelihood of succumbing to sunlight deprivation-induced depression. So, our living room is a vaulted, two-story-high affair, the ceiling line of which extends straight up to the upper peak of the second floor.

Translation: a hella amount of wall space to cover with paint.

The bug bit Katrina sometime around Valentine's Day, right around the time our good friend Jen (of Dave and Jen - yes, any old Bethany Long Beach people know who I'm talking about) started painting her kitchen. I guess the paint fumes reawakened something in her, because the next thing I knew we were wandering the aisles at our local Miller Paint Store, debating the differences in color swatches.

Correction: she was debating the differences between color swatches. I was simply along for the ride.

The reason I was merely an observer, and not a participant, can be summed up in how I describe the color of the walls in our living room.

When asked, I tell people, "green."

When Katrina's asked, she tells them, "sage."

I'll be honest: I don't understand "sage." I understand "green." Just as I don't understand "lavender," and how it differs from "lilac." And don't get me started on "puce." Sounds like something you do after you have one too many beers and three too many cigars at your bachelor party: "Dude, Scooter, you totally puced off the side of the trampoline!!"

The reason for this lack of understanding, I believe, can be traced back to an early childhood aberration foisted upon the men of my generation (and countless others before and since, I believe):

We got gypped on crayons.

When little girls when I was growing up were given the mega-colossal-128-count boxes of Crayolas, boys had to make do with the lame-o box of eight.

That's right, eight friggin' crayons.

While girls got to debate the nuances of "red-orange" vs. "orange-red," we were stuck with the Eight Primary Colors of Life for Boys, as determined by the Crayola Corporation: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Black, and Brown. Note that the sixth color listed is "Purple," not the sissyfied "Violet." Back then, Violet was the lame second-stringer in the Peanuts cartoons who always wanted to be like Lucy, but couldn't quite make the cut.

I'm sure it's because of some generous soul over there at Crayola that they deigned to even give us the two colors that fall outside the natural spectrum, i.e. brown and black. I guess they figured we'd want to draw a lot of tree trunks and outer space scenes (which they were right about, I might add).

And don't even bring up the fact that the girls got the way cool metallic crayons like silver, bronze and gold. (Oh, yeah - remember the big politically correct scandal over the "fleshtone"crayon? I mean, come on! It's like Band-Aids - the only people whose skin those matched was Barbie's and Ken's).

And another thing: while girls got the cool, slim crayons that could be sharpened with the included crayon sharpener on the box, we boys were stuck with the Neanderthal-sized ones that could only be sharpened by gnawing on them with your teeth.

As I sit here writing, home sick from work, I look out from my second-floor loft across the living room, its walls dazzling even in the diminished light of a rainy morning, and I can see that the walls certainly aren't something as pedestrian as the color green.



They're light green.