The yellow was my mother’s idea.
She is the one I should credit, or who my neighbors should blame depending on their perspective, because she is the one who stood in the driveway of the house on Clement Street the week after I bought it and put her hand over her eyes and squinted at the clapboard siding and said: it needs color.
The house at that point was the specific beige of a rental property that has been painted by landlords who understand that beige offends no one and attracts no particular attention, which is the goal of a landlord but not the goal of someone who intends to live in the house they are buying.
I said: what color?
She said: something that makes you happy.
She said: not something sensible. Something that makes you happy.
This was her way, the specific quality of a woman who had spent sixty years making sensible choices and who, at sixty, had decided to stop recommending them to other people.
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