Challenge: Focus on a color.
In Praise of Purple
Yes, my hair is purple — and, yes, it's my favorite color, a mixture of red and blue, fire and ice. It’s royal, but better than that, it’s “when I grow old I shall wear” Tutu in all her live out loud glory, wide smile and laugh, indefatigable chain lightning glowing lavender from my head. It’s a way of tempering dissolution, of dyeing against dying, a pandemic yawp sounded from the windows of my madwoman attic, a fuck you to slipping under into grey. It’s in your face, man, it’s silly and bumptious and larger than your ordinary wife, a signal to my tribe of melancholy matrons, meeting as we do in parking lots, saying "yes, dear, you can" and a crown for every 6 year old princess who stops to shower me with ecstatic adoration. It’s April crocus and June iris, pulchritudinous violets colonizing your chemical lawns, spring and summer sunsets in zero weather, shouting hallelujah in a Puritan church, laughing and singing and dancing inside this wrinkled skin with the chorus of hard headed women who wore the color before me -- a long line of mothers, grandmothers, of sassy aunts in hot pants, of makers, doers, and survivors, of loud, proud purple warriors.
