Pink, red, vermilion
What’s it like to live in a town named for a color?
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Preview of pink
The salmon-pink blooms of flowering quince are so beautiful, I wonder why more gardeners don’t grow this shrub. The flowers outside my dining room window grace my life from mid-February through May. Many more pink photos are below.
Vulnerable
Maybe it’s the political climate, but I feel so vulnerable these days. My writing drips with darkness. It’s as if I dip the quill in an inkwell of gall.
Sinkholes
Even a tiny crack Can rupture to a fissure. Soon the house is falling through The sinkhole in the lawn. We never signed up for this! Or, perhaps, we really did. Scanning social media While the country fell apart. Jesus with a machine gun, Symbol of our new nation. Love, forgiveness, compassion— Instead, cruelty and hardness. Frustration, fear, trepidation, Not knowing how to answer. Power shifts, the cracks begin, Sinkholes yawn for all of us.
Pink
For me, one antidote to gloom and doom is to go out into the world and find pattern, texture and color. These things ground me, inspire me, revive me.
Pink was never a color I liked. I thought it was too girly, too cute. Until about 10 years ago when pink hit me upside the head and I fell in love with it.
A neighbor’s pink watering can got me to thinking about pink things to photograph.
Nice idea, but challenging. Portland is not exactly a pink town. Even though it is the City of Roses, its color palette tends to be muted.
There is a skyscraper downtown called Big Pink. It was the US Bankcorp Tower until US Bank decided to move out. It is famously built as a parallelogram to fit a jagged lot, and the pink come from Spanish granite and a gold-pink window tint.
I did find some pink things near me on Hawthorne Boulevard. Vintage Pink sells what used to be called antiques.
3D pink roses line the walls at Champagne Poetry, a pastry shop on Hawthorne. Some of the pastries are pink, too. They are really good!
Besides the pink door, this scene outside Champagne Poetry has other interesting objects, like the fire alarm and the gas meter.
A world of pink
Keep an eye out for pink things, and they will appear. Below are shoes, a sign, the pink ribbon around the soon-to-be removed utility pole in our front yard, and a display of Hello Kitty merchandise at Kinokuniya Portland.
Red
There are many words for red: crimson, maroon, flame, coral, cardinal. Jewel colors, garnet and ruby. Wine colors, claret and burgundy. Food colors, cherry and salmon. Some red colors are names, like Ruby, Carmine, Rufus, Rusty.
I like one red shade in particular: vermilion.
Here’s a line from a favorite poem, “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
. . . blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
The image, the rhythm—perfect. Sometimes I see sunsets that remind me of this passage, the sky opening to what look like golden embers.
Spelling
Is the word “vermilion” spelled with one “l” or two? Spell check lets you have it either way, but the color is supposed to be one-l. Some geographic features use Vermillion.
Making vermilion
Vermilion is a pigment traditionally ground from mercuric sulfide, aka cinnabar. Cinnabar occurs in nature, but it is toxic. These days vermilion is produced by heating mercury and sulfur.
One other name for vermilion is Chinese red, the hue of Chinese lacquer and of this door in Portland’s Chinatown district.
Places called Vermillion
There are towns called Vermillion, with two l’s, in Minnesota (pop. 441) and Kansas (76). A bigger town named Vermillion (11,695) is in South Dakota. This Vermillion is home to the University of South Dakota and a great city motto: “Vermillion is close to everything and far from ordinary.”
Plucky USD proudly notes on its website’s home page that it’s no. 273 in US News & World Report’s list of best national universities and 152nd in its list of public schools. Elsewhere, it says that 99 percent of applicants are admitted. Those are good odds.
One-l Vermilion towns may be found in Ohio (10,695) and the Canadian province of Alberta (3,948), where the red clay that gave the town its name is used to make bricks.
Closer to home, there’s a Vermillion Street in Newberg, about half a mile from Herbert Hoover Park and the Hoover-Minthorn House Museum. There’s a Vermillion Drive in Tualatin, too.
Then there’s Vermilion Cliffs National Monument near Flagstaff, Ariz. The BLM, which administers the site, notes that there are no paved roads and suggests visitors drive a high-clearance four-wheel drive vehicle to navigate the sand.
Another high-rise
Here is a photo of a high-clearance vehicle closer to home. It’s parked in the handicapped spot outside the temporary library book pickup spot on Hawthorne. The truck had a disabled placard hanging from the mirror. I just wonder how anybody with a disability could climb into this monster.
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Decay
A bittersweet essay I wrote about decay is live on Juke.
One more time around
I’m still milking the secret code in Portland addresses that I first wrote about in my posting called “Ghost Streets” last August. The latest is a piece I wrote for The Southeast Examiner. It’s in the March 2025 edition.
Read Becoming on Kindle
You can read any Substack posting on Kindle by using the “share” menu and clicking on “Kindle.” You may have to add Kindle to your favorites list in “settings.”
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Until next week
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I loved this issue Fran. I am not a fan of pink and your pictures delighted me. I may begin my own search for pink in my travels. The feeling of vulnerability is...in many of us.
I recently discovered that the tile in the bathroom of my 1949 house used to be pink because a bit of the white paint now covering it chipped off. Aha! That explains the old gray-with-pink-flecks linoleum on the floor. So, I decided the bathroom should revert to pink by making pink curtains and buying a couple of pink towels and a pink shower curtain and a partly pink runner rug. It's a whole new look and I have to admit to being rather fond of it.