The Color of Memory

My first memories of color are innocent. Yellow. Blue. Red. Green. Holding my crayons in a fisted hand, I pressed out the shapes of stick-straight sunbeams in uniform skies, and bubble-shaped flowers on dipping horizons of grass. I toted a clutch of my favorite colors wherever I went, trailing the waxy scent of satisfaction that is strongest when we are interested only in primary shades.

My older brother first tempted me with conflicting notions, when he used almost all sixty-four crayons in the Crayola box to fill in the bark of a tree. His drawing was a stark contrast to my insistent brown stalks.

“Trees aren’t all those colors,” I said.

“Yes, they are,” he said. “Next time, look closer, much closer.”

When I held his picture nearer to my face, he laughed because I hadn’t understood that he meant I should become a keener observer of trees. Instead I paid sharper attention to the rows of crayons in the box. They stood up like a chorus, evenly organized on cardboard risers, some calling to me more than others. What if my brother was right and all those colors really were in a single tree? Then it seemed possible that the entire world might also be hidden somewhere in that box. Burnt Sienna. Sepia. Cornflower. Bittersweet. Mulberry. I admired these colors with suspicion, wondering what sorts of pictures would make them useful. I turned away, thinking their time might come, if ever my favorites were lost or eaten by wild animals.

Color is not a physical quantity, an inherent property of any object; the perception of color is based on our collective capacity to detect reflected wavelengths of light. We say an apple is red because the skin of the fruit absorbs every other wavelength of the visible spectrum except for red; we perceive the apple’s single omission, which it gifts back to us. If I had known this as a child I am sure my immediate question would have been: When blind people look at an apple, is it still red? I’ve read that even people blind from birth have associations of color, and this makes perfect sense to me. After driving with my parents through New England to witness the flame of fall foliage, we would talk about the trees—the magnificent trees—whose molting canopies sheltered streams of light as we stood beneath them with our backs to the wind, sipping steaming spiced cider. Helen Keller once wrote in her diary that all children must be happy to see the leaves glow emerald, ruby, gold, and crimson. Even though she had never seen those colors, so deep was her belief that their delight was universal. Now, when I walk with closed eyes through ankle-high piles of late-October leaves, their crisp rustle conjures more than just a vision of a seasonal spectrum. The gentle shush and crackle beneath my feet is color incarnate—come to life as time, place, and heart.

I don’t remember the exact moment when my color naiveté ended, but I do remember this. While on vacation with my parents in the Bahamas, I sat with my mother at the airport. I swung my feet, which didn’t quite touch the pavement, and rolled a multicolored lollipop around my tongue. The lollipop was a fantastic swirl of flavors—cherry, tangerine, lemon, and lime. Across from us another mother-daughter pair waited. The girl kept her face turned into her mother’s side. She could have been my age; her shoes just grazed the ground from the height of the bench. My mother offered the girl one of my sweets. To my greedy relief, she did not respond. Her mother apologized, explaining that the girl hadn’t spoken since the plane crash. In hushed tones she described the misfortune of an icy runway in a faraway land and the desire to recuperate in the tropics, a place where things don’t freeze. My lollipop suddenly tasted cloying as I sketched out in my mind for the first time the innumerable reasons a plane—like the one...