Pink

My new pink tshirt. I bought it after reading a short snippet of writing by Sarah Addison Allen. She is my favorite female author and I have read her books many times. Garden Spells and Lost Lake are favorites with her newest book, Other Birds sitting on the shelf by my chair for a reread. They are magic.

She is posting snippets of stories on her Facebook and Instagram page that are great feel good stories. She had a little story every day in December about Christmas.

This is her pink story that prompted me to buy a new pink shirt….

“Make your own pink. That was Aunt Brynn’s philosophy.

But there were times when it wasn’t the easiest thing to do.

Like when Toni’s Very Bad Year stretched into Another Very Bad Year. When she broke up with her boyfriend and lost her cat and her beloved Aunt Brynn died. When she found herself moving several states away to the old, narrow house she’d inherited from her aunt, to an unfriendly neighborhood where she knew no one.

If Starting All Over were a color, it was most decidedly *not* pink. It was gray, a cold, steely, February gray.

Just to get out of the house for a while when the task of boxing up her Aunt Brynn’s belongings got to be too much, Toni started walking around the neighborhood. And her neighbors began to stop her, anxious to tell stories about Aunt Brynn. How she made pink collars for all the neighborhood pets. How she baked strawberry tarts for every birthday. How she planted pink flowers every year. How brave she’d been when she’d gotten sick. How she’d made every single one of her days, even the bad ones, pink. They all ended their stories the same way, their words coming out in varying shades of blue: “The neighborhood just isn’t the same without her.”

One morning when Toni woke up, thinking that facing another day felt like the color green, pond scum green, the kind you don’t want to touch, she thought she heard her Aunt Brynn’s voice as clear as if she were at the foot of the bed:

“Darling girl, make your own pink.”

And that’s exactly what Toni did. She bought pink house paint and painted the house. She got out Aunt Brynn’s old pink truck and bought every pink flower she could find. The neighborhood seemed to wake out of a long sleep. They threw a spring block party and started a book club where they only read books with pink covers. A cat with a pink collar even started showing up on Toni's doorstep. It belonged to a handsome single neighbor who’d thought the world of Aunt Brynn. He asked Toni out, and she had a pink cosmo (in Brynn's honor) on their first date.

So, no, making your own pink isn’t the easiest thing to do.

But out of all the colors in the world, it’s the most worth the trouble.”…

Pick your color and make your world happy.