Gray Area
Me (forceful voice), “We should move. Why do we stay—choose to live in a place that is so damn gray.”
Husband (ponderous), “Hm, we could wake up every day to sunshine and warmth. Maybe we should move.”
Me (whine sneaking in), “Where? Where would we move?”
Husband (losing patience), “Where? There are a million places that aren’t here. You’re the one who suggested it.”
Me (exasperated), “We can’t move. I don’t even know if I want to move. I just want to see something above me other than shades of gray.”
Husband (calm), “Gray is a beautiful color. You should learn to appreciate it.”
Me (dismissive), “Blaah.”
This is how the conversation begins between my husband and I every winter we have lived in Olympia, Washington. Before settling in the small port town that is also the state capitol, we explored and lived in the various corners and crevices of the Pacific Northwest: a college town in the Palouse surrounded by wheat fields, the Bavarian Disneyland town of Leavenworth, a small, Victorian-esque town called Snohomish, two harvest seasons in the orchards northeast of Spokane, Bend before it became a shout-out on the map, the funky, patched neighborhoods of Portland before the Pearl and the Northeast areas debuted. We’d experienced the different climates throughout the region when we chose to make our lives, as adults often do, more concrete and stable (read: married, tax paying employment, children) and planted in Olytown.
We gambled on Olympia because the on the late summer day we visited, the sun was shining, the sky a pale blue devoid of clouds, and the snow-capped Olympics and towering Mount Rainier beckoned us from the rocky shores of the Puget Sound. I loved the smell of the salt water and the heat was a welcome caress, perfect temperate 85 degrees. People walked and biked through town, suits and shiny leather loafers among soiled thrift shop scores and glinting silver piercings—the common thread?—everyone was smiling.
We smiled.
We didn’t know that these were the coveted months; the reprieve from the “rainy season.” I doubt it would have made a difference on that day, a day without a hint of gray. It was the arrangement of all the natural elements – surrounding forests and the sound and rivers worming through and around town that propelled us to put down a deposit on a house and call for a U-Haul. We entered into our courtship with Olympia.
• • •
“It’d get boring to wake up every day to sunshine—don’t you think? I mean we wouldn’t want to stay indoors and write or paint, we’d surely suffer as artists—right? Do you agree?” This is me talking and really asking for validation in why we don’t pick up and leave the rainy, too often gray, and bleak place we call home. It has become a habit of mine, every winter, to bring up the subject of moving as a way of remembering that inside my wintered cocoon my appreciation for life grows and my creativity unleashes.
My husband, the visual artist, is partial to the colors of our winter sky. He is in rapture with the somberness, rejoices in the shadows, and melts into the comfort zone gray days produce and hold. My mind clicks ahead and I realize that we always have this conversation because it is my conversation, it is my way of making sense and falling back in love with this area of the world I spend the majority of my time. The winter weather conversation is a tradition, a ploy for me to stop finding fault and acknowledge the gray doesn’t have to be sad, or dull, or cold.
When people visit from sunnier, drier places they want to know how—how do you live with all this rain? Don’t you get sick of it? Do your kids get enough vitamin D? I heard lack of vitamin D causes autism. . . . I admit, my patience used to be greater and in the beginning years of my tenure in Olympia I’d of rolled my eyes and nodded in agreement but now I roll my eyes and say, “My kids aren’t autistic, the rain does suck sometimes but how else would we have such beauty, so much green? Besides, the rainy season makes me appreciate the sunshine even more and gray is sexy.”
They laugh and shrug away my explanation.
In the remaining days of autumn, with the chill in the air and the threat of snow in the mountains, I long for the sky to take on its cloud cape and smother out the brightness. I want to wrap myself in blankets, sit beside a fire (even if it’s gas), and sink into melancholy. I wonder if the winter took on a violet hue or the world was painted in a muted orange would winter be the same, if I would feel the same.
I have known a brighter winter, have felt the freezing air and warm sunshine hit my face at the same time—I grew up in eastern Washington. The biggest difference is the sky. It’s contained on the west side of the state, like it’s been boxed-in but the lid left off, it feels like there are limits and lines. When I crest Snoqualmie Pass and zigzag my car down I-90 toward Ellensburg the world opens up, even if it is night, my chest feels lighter, my breathing lets loose, and I sense the oxygen on my tongue, melting into me like it were cotton candy. I’ve tried to describe this feeling to my husband, to my children but they shake their heads and laugh, trying to envision what on earth I am talking about—they who have only grown up on one side of the mountains, their memories aren’t clouded by vast miles of nothing but sky as far as the eye can see. But I didn’t have a relationship to the colors of the weather like I do in Olympia; I never zeroed in on the sameness of the baby blue sky, the winter never enveloped me scratching and soothing my artistic soul the way the gray world of the Puget Sound has.
• • •
Daily weather report, November to May: mostly cloudy, scattered showers.
Gray is neutral, an achromatic color that can be created by mixing any complementary colors. The color is its own complement meaning that the complement of gray is gray.
Gray is the balance between white and black; and with seventy-five percent of my year sold to me in various shades of gray, I must find balance. Because like any love affair, my love wanes at times and I am left with only a memory of why I loved.
• • •
“You know what gray area means?” my husband asks.
“The middle? The area between what is and what isn’t? I don’t know,” I reply.
I think this is a trick question.
“Gray area is a concept—when you aren’t sure where to place something.”
“Hm,” I mumble.
I live in a gray area, literally and figuratively, and I like this concept, I like what it implies about where I live, where I am in life. I start to wake up each morning and determine the kind of gray the day is—a misty opaque whitish-gray, a dark gray, purplish-black like a bruise, a washed out warm gray—and I give names to the ways the gray makes me feel, to use as a barometer of what the day holds. I begin to fall in love with gray anew each winter and it becomes more than a color, more than the weather; its home.
Dawn Pichon Barron lives in Olympia, Washington.
