pink of perception

It's funny what you can figure out by just deciding to do one simple thing. A few weeks ago I decided that I wanted to take pictures of three different pink things—and only one of them could be a flower or a plant. Turns out, there is not a lot of pink in my life. I decided to do this after I found and started reading Pink of Perfection, which got me thinking about the color, especially after she posted photos of her new, empowering pink bathroom (which was funny, also, because another one of my recent favorite bloggers, Morgan at The Brick House, has a pink bathroom that she has quite opposite feelings about).

Saying "there's not a lot of pink in my life" is not supposed to be a metaphor or euphemism but kind of can't help sounding that way. There's plenty of "pink" in "my life," but looking for my third pink photo—the first two came easy—kind of weirdly got me on this "appreciate the small things" kick. I've been keeping my windows open and listening to rain and crickets more. (It helps that I can hear both better from my apartment—the rain, in particular, because I live next to a tin-roofed carport and also because the gutter above my front door is massively clogged and turns into a mini-Niagra Falls if it so much as sprinkles. It started as quaint and nature-y but now, actually, it's getting kind of annoying. But. Pink pink pink!) I've been unusually happy with my one cup of coffee each morning and the strained gurglings of my coffeemaker which I am pretty sure means it's about to brew its last breath but, now, are reassuring and homey to me in my zombified morning state of heightened smallness appreciation.

I'm not about to paint my own bathroom pink—I'm still recovering from the great Mary Engelbreit Binge of 1994 which resulted in me dictating that my mom paint my bedroom a particularly heinous bubblegum-ass hue. But I'm trying to notice it whenever it pops into my life, and it's bringing a lot of other stuff to the surface. And even if that's just glaring need for maintenance requests and possibly soon-to-be-defunct home appliances, it's something, at least.