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Color My World

© Domini Hedderman

Domini Hedderman is a writer from Erie, Pa. When not writing, she spends her time with her husband and two small children or teaching technical writing at a local college. This article appeared in the October 1, 2003 issue of Whim's Place, a newsletter for writers published by Suite101's Betsy Gallup. It is used with Domini's permission.

Enter a landscape of visual delicacies: clear-eyed blues, fresh and frothy; streaming sunshine and buttercup yellows; reds of quiet warmth and passionate desire; pastoral, serene greens.

Friends and family call me crazy for always choosing the most extreme colors in my decorating. The tiny cards I pluck from the hardware store's paint rack are swiped vibrantly and given names like "warm gold," "blueberry muffin" and "spring violet." Never would I choose a color from the "white" selection of paints, unless I plan to use it to trim my brightly-colored walls.

I drink up color like some slurp coffee or beer. White spaces, unimaginative and boring, make me nervously twitchy and remind me of my first apartment where I wasn't permitted to change anything, including the dull expanse of dirty white. Then I endured a lack of freedom to change my personal world; now I can't seem to stop myself from exaggeratedly coloring it. Call me crazy. But call me colorful.

When my husband and I bought our first house, the task of picking paint colors for a whole new place became our obsession. We lived in the small second-floor flat as we decorated it and our sense of style was greatly impacted by the fun we were having as newlyweds. With some passionate spins of the roller, we coated the living room walls in an energetic "late tomato" red and made the room blush. On another day, with sunshine filtering through the glistening windows, we splashed the color of sunflowers through the hallway. We freshened the kitchen with pale greens and blues and sprung spring into the bathroom and dining room with shades of sweet violet.

The lower flat received the same colorful facelift and was transformed from smoky white to a tasteful palette of salmon, seascape blue, earthy green and lavender twilight.

We bought another rental property where we iced a bedroom with cool blue, whooshed a silvery mountain breeze through the dining room, coated buttery yellow on the kitchen walls and spread springtime grass in another bedroom. With each swipe of the roller, my heart sang. With each stroke of the brush, my visual thirst was appeased.

The copyright of the article Color My World in Decorating How-to is owned by Domini Hedderman. Permission to republish Color My World in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.