Brown
It was the first thing people commented on when they saw photos of our new house: the awful paint colors. “That paint!” “Those bold choices!” Every room was a different color, more intense than the one before. Sixteen-foot walls painted rust red, clementine orange, forest green, lapis blue. And the baseboard and molding were finished off with a certain “organic” shade of brown not talked about in polite society.
My husband and I have always loved color on our walls, but this was a new level. Especially the brown trim.
The house was a lemon, as some houses are. Instead of spending our money on painting in the first year of ownership, we spent our money on crises—a string of problems that our house inspection couldn’t have revealed. We tolerated it well enough, but then 2020 hit, and schools closed, and soon we were all spending a lot of time in our brown-trim house of fun. The paint began to feel oppressive, those hues weighing down on us along with the troubles of the year. My kids talked about how our house didn’t feel cozy. Sitting in the living room, you felt as though the walls were shouting at you.
A scheme began percolating in my head. What if I painted the house. It was an ambitious plan. No room—including the closets and garage—had been spared and nary a surface. Even the doors were painted the same intense colors. And since we were planning to repaint the trim and walls mostly white, almost everything would require three coats of paint. I kept thinking of a scene in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Robber Bride, where the college-aged villain paints her entire apartment black—including the toilet, sinks, appliances, and furniture—to spite the landlord that’s kicking her out. I could relate to that landlord.
I knew I couldn’t paint everything. Some of the walls are too high and I don’t love heights. (Plus a pandemic isn’t the time to fall off a ladder and end up in the hospital.) But even if I got rid of some of the crazy colors and that awful brown, it would help. Besides, painting felt like a way to earn some money back. I stopped freelancing in order to support my kids in their online school. If I wasn’t making money, I could be doing something that would save us money.
But most of all, painting was a way to see positive change in the midst of a dark time. It was asserting control in a situation that was out of control. To this end I related to Margaret Atwood’s villain: striking back against the circumstances put upon her. College landlords are known to be unscrupulous. And the villain was technically following the landlord’s rules: the lease allowed painting, but the color didn’t require approval.
Rereading that Margaret Atwood scene, I came across a detail I’d forgotten, a great one. After the villain paints her apartment black, she throws a party. And she wears all white, to stand out against the black. Being the villain, she of course doesn’t tell any of the other guests, who show up in mostly black, and she is nearly the only visible thing in the place. But the contrast got me thinking about color theory, the little I had learned in junior high art class.
White is the presence of all colors.
Black is the absence of all color.
And brown? Brown, like our brown trim, is what you get when you mix all the the paints together.
Maybe our particular shade of brown was a combination of all the terrible shades of paint colors in our house. Maybe the previous owner had taken the leftover buckets of wall color to the paint store and said, “whatever color these make,” and used it for the trim.
Or maybe he’d hired the color kittens.
The Color Kittens
The Color Kittens is A Little Golden Book by Margaret Wise Brown. I grew up with this story as part of A Treasury of Little Golden Books, edited by Ellen Lewis Buell. And then I was reintroduced to it in a reissued anthology that my parents gave my children when they were young.
For those unfamiliar with the story, Brush and Hush are a unique breed of cats called color kittens. They wear cute little striped overalls with matching caps and jaunty bandanas tied around their necks, and they carry around a kitten-sized extension ladder. They have unlimited buckets of paint with which to mix, but only primary colors, plus white and black.
Brush and Hush’s dilemma is that they don’t know how to make green. They have several false starts—they make pink first, then orange, then purple. When they finally succeed at green, they’re so happy that in their giddiness, they knock their paint buckets over and discover how to make brown.
“And in all that brown,” Margaret Wise Brown writes, “the sun went down.” Indeed.
While Margaret Wise Brown waxes poetic about the other colors in the book—pink like a baby’s nose, purple like a long afternoon shadow, green like glass—the brown page features a tugboat, a goat eating a rusting brown can, a beaver, and a broken piece of wood with the word “brown” on it. It is my least favorite page in the book. On my parents’ copy, it’s been scribbled on. I get the feeling that the author and illustrator felt similarly about brown as I do.
But if the sun does go down amidst all that brown, it rises again when the brown recedes. Because when I started painting my trim white, those rooms began to change. The air started to feel clearer. A calm settled. Even before I had touched the crazy wall colors, the absence of that brown breathed new life into our house. And it wasn’t just a coincidence, I discovered. There was a semi-scientific reason for it.
Cue the ox.
The Year of the Ox (and More Brown)
I rang in 2021 with as much relief and hope as the rest of the world. That hope has been dashed in light of the riots at the U.S. Capitol and the continuing rise in COVID-19 deaths. My daughter has a theory that since all the trouble started around the end of February 2020, we actually need to complete a twelve-month cycle before things really start to improve. I love her optimism.
But I enjoy superstition—mostly when it benefits me—and I had an idea to test her claim: the Chinese Zodiac. The Chinese New Year is later than ours—February 12 this year. Maybe that would be the world’s fresh start. After all, the zodiac sign for 2020 was the rat, which was completely fitting. And I was excited to see that the sign for 2021 was the ox—my sign.
Chinese Zodiac signs go by birth year, and I assumed that those years would be extra lucky for the person born in them. Unfortunately it’s exactly the opposite. The years of your Chinese Zodiac animal are very unlucky. My heart sank a little when I read that. So I continued reading, hoping for some redeeming news, something I could do to temper the bad luck. I was astonished when I found the answer.
The answer, it turns out, is brown.
According to the website ChineseNewYear.net, the color brown is especially unlucky for people born in the year of the ox. Given this information, I suspected that brown would be especially, especially unlucky for a person born in the year of the ox, living in the year of the ox. And if one’s whole house had brown moldings and baseboards, for example, I suspected the year would be especially, especially, especially unlucky.
Come to think of it, since I started painting, our luck had started to change. Only one or two things a month were breaking, instead of one or two per week. We located that charging cable we were desperately searching for. When we had to shut the water off to the whole house on Thanksgiving, it was merely for a few hours. And I think we finally got rid of the rats living in our bedroom ceiling. (Just in time to see the year of the rat out.) If I can paint over that brown trim fast enough, maybe I can change my luck for the coming year.
Or maybe I’ll just like my house better.
Or maybe, in the future when the pandemic is over, I’ll look at the trim and the walls and remember how our family—all of us—found opportunities during COVID. We used the time to make ourselves better. I’ll look at the trim and walls and feel proud. We did our best. We did all right.
That would be okay, too.
Sources
Atwood, Margaret. The Robber Bride. New York: Anchor Books, 1998.
Brown, Margaret Wise. The Color Kittens. New York: Random House, 2003.
Chinese New Year. “Year of the Ox.” Fefe Ho and Chloe Chiao. Accessed January 11, 2021. https://chinesenewyear.net/zodiac/ox/