3/26/2023 0 Comments Highbrow pink lemonade![]() ![]() ![]() “I will,” I replied.LONDON - Forget "Middlemarch," "Civilization" and all those other highbrow BBC programs.Īmericans are getting a taste of the stuff Britons really watch: Mr. She sensed it: an air of leisure, of a young woman in a room of her own, cherishing the peace and the sunshine and the warmth. “Time flies,” the woman said, and our house mother took it as a cue to rattle off some cliche or other, beginning with her favorite, “Let me tell you…”īefore leaving she smiled at me, nodding at the open books on my desk as well as the air. I wanted to paint it – a Chinese Norman Rockwell – and give it to her. I tried to imagine the woman as a young girl, wearing a frayed tank top and faded shorts, sitting with her back to the wall and a book resting on her knees, (for she looked bookish), reading on the sun porch with a glass of lemonade at her feet. “How wonderful,” I said, “And how strange that now I am living here.” I was suddenly reminded of the movie “If These Walls Could Talk” – a film about lesbians, if I remember correctly – but which essentially told the story of a house through the years. I tried to imagine what she was describing, and I almost could – though it meant mentally erasing the frat boys next door as well as the freshman dormitories across the street. “This was a sun porch,” she said, her eyes misting with nostalgia, “I used to sleep out here during the summers and drink lemonade during the day. The woman, consummately Berkeley despite having made her adult life on the east coast, shook her head in awe. Our house mother let her in and spoke loudly with her in the hall outside my room before finally peeking in to alert me that we had a visitor. In the middle of my senior year one of the house’s original inhabitants – now a grown woman of sixty something – happened to be visiting the area and, walking by her old house, turned back into a curious child. The wood floor was not – an imitation, laid over the original outdoor stuff and walls built where once, there was railing. My room had been, as I suspected, a balcony when the house was first built. Mostly though, I could be found in my room either napping, reading, watching TV, or surfing the internet, the sun’s rays generously warming some otherwise cold extremity. I basked on my bed, in my chair, on my other chair (the Ikea Poang, if you must know), and occasionally, left the room for a glass of water or nourishment the sun could not provide. It had three white walls and one pale green wall, (which I had frowned upon when I first moved in but now I pine for that pale green wall!) and three more windows than the average college student’s room (four!), which meant more sunlight streamed in than I knew what to do with. My point: I am still in love with my room on the third floor of the pale, peach house on Warring St. “Enjoy your time there, young woman,” I think and head back to my dim green hole. I walk by their rooms on the way downstairs or to the bathroom (which has more natural light than my room) and see them basking as I did once… ![]() The rest of the house is fine – painted odd colors here and there, but clean, cozy and filled with nice girls, slightly younger but who, in their wide-windowed, lovely-colored rooms, lounge on their beds and read in the abundant sunlight with their ankles crossed in the air. I have a red aluminum water bottle which I placed in a corner and now that corner looks like Christmas. It is not a calming forest green, or even a sickly hospital green, but a fiesta green (I suspect the paint was called “Fiesta Verde” or simply, “Fiesta!”). When you wash your face in the morning you realize you take longer because you are unconsciously trying to wash the green off your skin. You wake up to the green only to work in front of the green and when you sleep, the green creeps into your dreams and everything becomes tinged with it. You cannot do that with the walls of a room. A few years ago, I had a polo shirt of the same color and it complimented my skin tone in the summers when I was more tan, but when I tired of it I could fold it up and put it away in a drawer. A quick tour of the other four rooms (already staked out by the time I saw the house) showed better aesthetic judgment on display – pale blue, bright yellow, lovely lilac, and peachy pink – but this room, the middle room, right across from the bathroom and with only one window, the owners had decided to paint green. A few months ago I was in need of housing, which led me to find this room on Walnut St, painted a most unfortunate and baffling color. ![]() Serpentine is not a color, but if I had to describe the color of my room, it is the word I would use. ![]()
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