Here now. Small homes in outer east Portland. Our home is a corner home. It needs color as it is an old soft tired yellow, I’m thinking of light adobe with a crimson front door.
Oddly, while on the bus, I’ve noticed that a lot of corner houses are painted in neutral colors, but if I look down the block, the ones in the middle are more colorful. I was going to write about that, but I don’t think it holds up for every neighborhood.
Once my mother gave me tiles from Mexico. It had great colors of fish swimming I used them for a bath sink backsplash. We miss our Irvington cottage of many years but moved because it was time to down size.
I need to start using my account to post my poems of observations. Or my very short three paragraph fiction stories. As I’m going to subscribe to you now. I’m not hoping to hard for that for me. I need this creative platform. Keep sharing Fran. Fellow port lander. You have your finger on its magic.
We recently had to re-do our kitchen due to a burst pipe. It had gray tile when we moved in. I wasn’t doing that again. But it wasn’t easy finding colorful tile. I finally did find some. It’s not what I would’ve chosen if I’d had an unlimited budget, but apparently most people don’t like much color in their tile. Salmon, sky blue, butter yellow and white, applied in random fashion. And now our kitchen is cheerful even in a Portland winter!
When I redid the bathroom to make it accessible, we tore out the 1920s green tile. I wanted yellow, but the designer talked me out of it. Even though the colors are muted, gray, white and ivory, the effect is quite lovely. The paint is yellow and there’s yellow in the print of the shower curtain.
Here autumn and winter don't exist. The range of colors known to spring and summer never go away.
To see snow one must go to the mountains.
While states to the North shiver in extremely low temperatures we are shivering in temperatures in the low forties; flowers remain in bloom and trees are green with leaves.
Sadly, the cost of living in San Diego has been created by the highest amount of greed in the nation; prices floating upward like a wild river flowing in reverse. We are trapped here by the disability to go beyond our monthly costs.
Now I'm thinking how nice it would be to at least occasionally see drab colors that would allow me to think beyond the blandness without living in bright colors permanently, too poor to escape.
Here autumn and winter don't exist. The range of colors known to spring and summer never go away.
To see snow one must go to the mountains.
While states to the North shiver in extremely low temperatures we are shivering in temperatures in the low forties; flowers remain in bloom and trees are green with leaves.
Sadly, the cost of living in San Diego has been created by the highest amount of greed in the nation; prices floating upward like a wild river flowing in reverse. We are trapped here by the disability to go beyond our monthly costs.
Now I'm thinking how nice it would be to at least occasionally see drab colors that would allow me to think beyond the blandness without living in bright colors permanently, too poor to escape.
I'm choosing to think that the new sign in Starbucks is a very direct response to what you wrote. Yay for you. We can change the world ~ one 'real' cup at a time. My experience was with a clothes line: I had Scott put one up and next thing we knew, our neighbor had one, too,
We lost our clothesline when we built the wheelchair ramp in the back yard. I’ve always favored air-drying clothes, but I can’t do it anymore. Robert just wants to use the dryer, and I have to let him.
I'm here to defend gray, or, _grey_, as I prefer the British spelling. Spelling matters, because I'm weird, and _grey_ seems such a softer, nicer word than _gray_. I neither think of it as drab nor as a play to get less attention.
I don't think neutrals are an American phenomenon. Done right, a pale neutral can fill a room with light, as you'd see in Scandinavian homes. There's a world of expression possible in neutrals. They can make a house respectful to its surroundings (no one would give you lip if you painted your house pink in my deeply-rural part of Vermont, but it would look cruel against the natural backdrop).
One thing to consider is differences in sensory perspective. Part of the manifestation of my mild neurodivergence is that I find that bright colors or other visual noise make me manifestly agitated or anxious.
The walls of my bedroom are painted a light grey with just a tickling hint of warm mauve, like a secret, and the neutrality of that serves as a foil for the light and medium wood tones in the room. Through a just-barely-opened door into the master bath one can see that the bath itself is a braver, tonal lavender (with a hint of grey, like the yin to the bedroom's softer yang). I can commit to saturation in that smaller room because I can shut the door if I need to. This combination pleases me so much that sometimes an entry in my morning gratitude journal is along the lines of "I am grateful for the colors I chose for the bedroom and bathroom just beyond."
What's one person's _stark_ or empty is another person's soothing minimalism. While some people thrive in a saturated wash of color, others find contained dashes of color combined with contrasts scratches that same itch. To wit: I am sitting looking out the window at the river past a vase of tiny, hot-magenta carnations in my front room, which is painted in a range of cool greys, white and black.
There's also practicality, if we're talking about houses. It's not all desaturation here on our house in Vermont. Our garage was designed and colored to echo a small barn. Five mullioned square wood windows face east. The color here is maroon. This certainly qualifies as a color! But, you see, the front of the garage faces pure south. It is now an unsatisfying, unhealthy-looking pink from sunfade. We'll have to re-paint our house soon. The garage will remain dark, to contrast with the main body of the house, but it's going to go with either a desaturated navy or even a charcoal. Drab you may say, but also resource-saving as we won't have to re-paint again in a few years.
I think perhaps an element of why you find neutrals mildly objectionable could be that they suggest a lack of discretion or care, that greys are in some cases a kind of giving up or inattention. I understand that. And in some cases they are. We all know how glaring and uncharismatic it looks when room after room in a dwelling is white, or near-white, on every surface; it speaks of the impersonality of landlords painting over the scuffs and indiscretions of the previous tenants without any consideration of what might be more interesting (I picture apartment listings, vertical blinds, builder-grade fixtures). This is such a prevalent thing in the UK that there is a color name for it, _magnolia_, that particular just-off-white that implies institutional scale or damp housing blocks. My garret flat in Birmingham, England, in graduate school had magnolia walls. I disliked them so much that I decided to paint over them. I spilled a gallon of paint in someone's driveway on my painful hike back from the home-improvement store. The shame and embarrassment of this still burns.
I'm with you on the cars, though. I've seen the statistics that, yes, cars formerly were available in more colors, and consumers bought those. My car is white, which makes me glad I don't experience it from the outside most of the time (beggars could not be choosers on this one; I'm lucky to have the car, and white was what I got). But! The 2024 and 2025 models both introduced bright colors, including this almost electric blue that I covet.
I don’t hate gray. I’m a big fan of pussy willow (which you could call grey). I just have seen so many stark interiors in magazine layouts. And the apartment buildings are just plain utilitarian. I like Scandinavian decor, often softened with reds and warm wood tones.
Neither do I find neutrals objectionable. You may have noticed the walls in my house are neutral, except for the bedroom being pink. The new bathroom is tones of gray, white and ivory.
In Portland, we call the ubiquitous paint color Antique White. Like Magnolia, it’s got a cream element.
When I give stuff away on Buy Nothing, I tell people to look for the purple house with the orange trim. When April arrives there will also be a pink pig totem out front. My daughters have taught me to embrace bold coiors!
Loved your “Starbuck orderer” comment as I will be going to the Met Opera later this month to see the new production of “Moby Dick.” I look forward to hearing both Ahab and Starbuck sing.
Liked the piece but I'm not sure about your thesis. London is full of colour especially (but not only) bright red. Front doors of white houses are usually brightly coloured. Rental cars are nearly always red. Taxis often yellow. Plus, I have a bright pink kitchen based on...a geode!
Graygraygray. It is the sign of a beleaguered society. Did you ever see the movie, The Banger Sisters, with Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandan. Susan played an upper middle-class housewife, married to an important attorney! She was trying to leave her groupie past behind when her partner in groupiness, Goldie, shows up. They're sitting in the DMV why Susan's daughter is taking her driver's test. She looks around and realizes her whole wardrobe is the color of the DMV, beige.
About trailers, etc: trailer homes keep the wheels on and cover over them with panels. They're still very mobile. Manufactured homes are regular houses built in a climate-controlled factory and trucked to a prepared site and set down on a permanent foundation. So, you were right to use the word "trailer" for those pods. There's nothing really permanent about them at all.
I'm going to play with the prompt word "geode." I used it in a description of the characters in my novel, Paradise Ridge:
"Whenever he stretched out on that flat stone, sleek and damp in the sunlight, it confounded her that she could be related to such a man, much less be his twin. Somehow, she never saw herself sharing his qualities. Instead, a homely girl still stared back from the candid glare of the mirror. Leandro had often teased her, though, reminding her they were two halves of a geode cleaved at birth: sparkling crystals inside an unpolished crust."
I've yet to attempt the New York Times Crossword. I've been doing word puzzles for years, but I'll need a good swift kick to do that one.
Well, “mobile homes,” then. Some people object to trailers. There’s a lot of inventiveness in The New York Times crosswords, but they can be a time sink.
I so appreciate your quirky, much needed view on life, Fran!
Here now. Small homes in outer east Portland. Our home is a corner home. It needs color as it is an old soft tired yellow, I’m thinking of light adobe with a crimson front door.
I’ll send a pic out soon I hope. It’s house painting season. I was an llc. Still have the paint sprayer.
Oddly, while on the bus, I’ve noticed that a lot of corner houses are painted in neutral colors, but if I look down the block, the ones in the middle are more colorful. I was going to write about that, but I don’t think it holds up for every neighborhood.
Your color scheme sounds yummy.
Once my mother gave me tiles from Mexico. It had great colors of fish swimming I used them for a bath sink backsplash. We miss our Irvington cottage of many years but moved because it was time to down size.
I had some bathroom tiles that had ichneumons on them. I miss them, too. I left that house in 2002 when I downsized.
I need to start using my account to post my poems of observations. Or my very short three paragraph fiction stories. As I’m going to subscribe to you now. I’m not hoping to hard for that for me. I need this creative platform. Keep sharing Fran. Fellow port lander. You have your finger on its magic.
Please, fellow Portlander, share your writing! And thank you for subscribing. I cherish my paid subscribers.
We recently had to re-do our kitchen due to a burst pipe. It had gray tile when we moved in. I wasn’t doing that again. But it wasn’t easy finding colorful tile. I finally did find some. It’s not what I would’ve chosen if I’d had an unlimited budget, but apparently most people don’t like much color in their tile. Salmon, sky blue, butter yellow and white, applied in random fashion. And now our kitchen is cheerful even in a Portland winter!
When I redid the bathroom to make it accessible, we tore out the 1920s green tile. I wanted yellow, but the designer talked me out of it. Even though the colors are muted, gray, white and ivory, the effect is quite lovely. The paint is yellow and there’s yellow in the print of the shower curtain.
Your choices sound lovely and fun!
Sounds lovely. ☺️
Try living in the city of San Diego.
Here autumn and winter don't exist. The range of colors known to spring and summer never go away.
To see snow one must go to the mountains.
While states to the North shiver in extremely low temperatures we are shivering in temperatures in the low forties; flowers remain in bloom and trees are green with leaves.
Sadly, the cost of living in San Diego has been created by the highest amount of greed in the nation; prices floating upward like a wild river flowing in reverse. We are trapped here by the disability to go beyond our monthly costs.
Now I'm thinking how nice it would be to at least occasionally see drab colors that would allow me to think beyond the blandness without living in bright colors permanently, too poor to escape.
Try living in the city of San Diego.
Here autumn and winter don't exist. The range of colors known to spring and summer never go away.
To see snow one must go to the mountains.
While states to the North shiver in extremely low temperatures we are shivering in temperatures in the low forties; flowers remain in bloom and trees are green with leaves.
Sadly, the cost of living in San Diego has been created by the highest amount of greed in the nation; prices floating upward like a wild river flowing in reverse. We are trapped here by the disability to go beyond our monthly costs.
Now I'm thinking how nice it would be to at least occasionally see drab colors that would allow me to think beyond the blandness without living in bright colors permanently, too poor to escape.
I'm choosing to think that the new sign in Starbucks is a very direct response to what you wrote. Yay for you. We can change the world ~ one 'real' cup at a time. My experience was with a clothes line: I had Scott put one up and next thing we knew, our neighbor had one, too,
Thanks for the punch!
We lost our clothesline when we built the wheelchair ramp in the back yard. I’ve always favored air-drying clothes, but I can’t do it anymore. Robert just wants to use the dryer, and I have to let him.
I'm here to defend gray, or, _grey_, as I prefer the British spelling. Spelling matters, because I'm weird, and _grey_ seems such a softer, nicer word than _gray_. I neither think of it as drab nor as a play to get less attention.
I don't think neutrals are an American phenomenon. Done right, a pale neutral can fill a room with light, as you'd see in Scandinavian homes. There's a world of expression possible in neutrals. They can make a house respectful to its surroundings (no one would give you lip if you painted your house pink in my deeply-rural part of Vermont, but it would look cruel against the natural backdrop).
One thing to consider is differences in sensory perspective. Part of the manifestation of my mild neurodivergence is that I find that bright colors or other visual noise make me manifestly agitated or anxious.
The walls of my bedroom are painted a light grey with just a tickling hint of warm mauve, like a secret, and the neutrality of that serves as a foil for the light and medium wood tones in the room. Through a just-barely-opened door into the master bath one can see that the bath itself is a braver, tonal lavender (with a hint of grey, like the yin to the bedroom's softer yang). I can commit to saturation in that smaller room because I can shut the door if I need to. This combination pleases me so much that sometimes an entry in my morning gratitude journal is along the lines of "I am grateful for the colors I chose for the bedroom and bathroom just beyond."
What's one person's _stark_ or empty is another person's soothing minimalism. While some people thrive in a saturated wash of color, others find contained dashes of color combined with contrasts scratches that same itch. To wit: I am sitting looking out the window at the river past a vase of tiny, hot-magenta carnations in my front room, which is painted in a range of cool greys, white and black.
There's also practicality, if we're talking about houses. It's not all desaturation here on our house in Vermont. Our garage was designed and colored to echo a small barn. Five mullioned square wood windows face east. The color here is maroon. This certainly qualifies as a color! But, you see, the front of the garage faces pure south. It is now an unsatisfying, unhealthy-looking pink from sunfade. We'll have to re-paint our house soon. The garage will remain dark, to contrast with the main body of the house, but it's going to go with either a desaturated navy or even a charcoal. Drab you may say, but also resource-saving as we won't have to re-paint again in a few years.
I think perhaps an element of why you find neutrals mildly objectionable could be that they suggest a lack of discretion or care, that greys are in some cases a kind of giving up or inattention. I understand that. And in some cases they are. We all know how glaring and uncharismatic it looks when room after room in a dwelling is white, or near-white, on every surface; it speaks of the impersonality of landlords painting over the scuffs and indiscretions of the previous tenants without any consideration of what might be more interesting (I picture apartment listings, vertical blinds, builder-grade fixtures). This is such a prevalent thing in the UK that there is a color name for it, _magnolia_, that particular just-off-white that implies institutional scale or damp housing blocks. My garret flat in Birmingham, England, in graduate school had magnolia walls. I disliked them so much that I decided to paint over them. I spilled a gallon of paint in someone's driveway on my painful hike back from the home-improvement store. The shame and embarrassment of this still burns.
I'm with you on the cars, though. I've seen the statistics that, yes, cars formerly were available in more colors, and consumers bought those. My car is white, which makes me glad I don't experience it from the outside most of the time (beggars could not be choosers on this one; I'm lucky to have the car, and white was what I got). But! The 2024 and 2025 models both introduced bright colors, including this almost electric blue that I covet.
I don’t hate gray. I’m a big fan of pussy willow (which you could call grey). I just have seen so many stark interiors in magazine layouts. And the apartment buildings are just plain utilitarian. I like Scandinavian decor, often softened with reds and warm wood tones.
Neither do I find neutrals objectionable. You may have noticed the walls in my house are neutral, except for the bedroom being pink. The new bathroom is tones of gray, white and ivory.
In Portland, we call the ubiquitous paint color Antique White. Like Magnolia, it’s got a cream element.
When I give stuff away on Buy Nothing, I tell people to look for the purple house with the orange trim. When April arrives there will also be a pink pig totem out front. My daughters have taught me to embrace bold coiors!
I love bold colors, too. Also pastels . . . and gray.
Loved your “Starbuck orderer” comment as I will be going to the Met Opera later this month to see the new production of “Moby Dick.” I look forward to hearing both Ahab and Starbuck sing.
Liked the piece but I'm not sure about your thesis. London is full of colour especially (but not only) bright red. Front doors of white houses are usually brightly coloured. Rental cars are nearly always red. Taxis often yellow. Plus, I have a bright pink kitchen based on...a geode!
I wrote last year about London and Paris being largely dirty white limestone. Surely I’m being unfair. Of course there are pops of color!
In Portland, there are few cabs left thanks to Lyft and Uber, and not many of them are yellow.
I have a medium pink bedroom. Is your geode purple?
Graygraygray. It is the sign of a beleaguered society. Did you ever see the movie, The Banger Sisters, with Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandan. Susan played an upper middle-class housewife, married to an important attorney! She was trying to leave her groupie past behind when her partner in groupiness, Goldie, shows up. They're sitting in the DMV why Susan's daughter is taking her driver's test. She looks around and realizes her whole wardrobe is the color of the DMV, beige.
About trailers, etc: trailer homes keep the wheels on and cover over them with panels. They're still very mobile. Manufactured homes are regular houses built in a climate-controlled factory and trucked to a prepared site and set down on a permanent foundation. So, you were right to use the word "trailer" for those pods. There's nothing really permanent about them at all.
I'm going to play with the prompt word "geode." I used it in a description of the characters in my novel, Paradise Ridge:
"Whenever he stretched out on that flat stone, sleek and damp in the sunlight, it confounded her that she could be related to such a man, much less be his twin. Somehow, she never saw herself sharing his qualities. Instead, a homely girl still stared back from the candid glare of the mirror. Leandro had often teased her, though, reminding her they were two halves of a geode cleaved at birth: sparkling crystals inside an unpolished crust."
I've yet to attempt the New York Times Crossword. I've been doing word puzzles for years, but I'll need a good swift kick to do that one.
Well, “mobile homes,” then. Some people object to trailers. There’s a lot of inventiveness in The New York Times crosswords, but they can be a time sink.
LOL! Time sink ... just like FB et al.