One More Coat of Paint
My sister-in-law Gila loves to paint. The family jokes that the rooms in her house keep getting smaller and smaller as the paint on her walls gets thicker and thicker each time she decides to repaint! I, on the other hand, would rather dust than paint and that’s really saying something! There’s a history …
My cousin Tracy started it all, I’m pretty sure. We were four, maybe five years old in the mid-fifties when we slipped away from our folks and went down to the cellar to explore. My mother’s home-canned jars of food on the shelves shared the cellar with old broken-down wooden chairs, forgotten flowerpots, rusted tools, and many other items headed to the dump someday. But we found a couple of items that interested us – a can with a little bit of thick paint and a couple of dried-up brushes.
What to do? What to do? What we did was what any kid might do. We painted. We painted the side of my uncle’s new truck! It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but apparently it wasn’t. I don’t remember getting into trouble, so my uncle must not have seen our artwork until they got home. My cousin, his son, on the other hand …
A few years later, Tracy and I made another stab at painting, this time trying out a new medium. Our farm in Bradford County is just a mile or so from the Wyoming County line. One hot, sunny summer day, we rode our bikes out to the line. It was so hot that the tar on the road was soft and gooey. We used our fingers to scoop up the tar and filled in the letters on the county line sign – the B, the R, the A, the D, the O, the R, the D, and the O in Wyoming! They replaced the sign years ago, but I wish we’d taken a picture
Along about the same time of the sign painting, I spent a night with my cousins at their house on Oak Hill. When I got there, my Aunt Marie was just finishing painting the outside landing and steps. Later in the day, she hollered at us kids, “Who stepped in the paint?” We all denied doing it. Smart lady that she was, she asked us each to show her the bottoms of our feet. I’m not proud to admit that only my feet showed faint signs of gray paint. My cousin Suky never let me forget it!
Many years later, when our youngest son left for college, my husband, Gary and I decided to paint his bedroom. We wanted a warm color that would be welcoming to visitors. I spent a long time choosing a good color, settling on a lovely shade of pink, or so it seemed! By the time we had two walls painted, I told Gary we had to stop. My lovely shade of pink turned out to be more of a shockingly gaudy shade of raspberry. So, we reluctantly repainted with a lovely shade of neutral tan.
The “lovely” shade of pink
One final paint-related story happened just a few years ago. We decided to have our niece paint the inside walls of our new house, so we went to Lowes to get ceiling paint. With no need to worry about picking a color, I quickly found the paint that we wanted and pulled the gallon can off the shelf. Unfortunately, the can below it stuck to my can and went crashing to the floor with the lid popping off. My black leather shoes and blue jeans took the biggest hit while Gary laughed and took pictures. I just waited for the clean-up-on-Aisle-5 people to arrive.
The Accident
Fast forward to today. Our bedroom and bathroom need to be repainted. I wonder what my sister-in-law is doing next week. I don’t have time to paint; I will be dusting!