blue days

Blue has always been my favorite color. I don’t know if has something to do with the melancholy in me or the fact that I always wanted to impress the boys with my color choice. No pink for me, I’m not a girly girl. I like blue! Whatever, obviously no boys really care.

Yellow used to hold a close second so much so that in high school I painted my bedroom yellow. I later learned that the color yellow can induce anxiety. For my genealogy, that was not a good color choice.

In the past couple of years I’ve been more partial to white. The cleansing and calming aspect of that single color is not lost on me. In fact it is the one thing I remember most about the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Strange, you might think, but you would be wrong.
The museum, of course, is so heavily laden with solemn and difficult images. As you travel through the “life” of a concentration camp an overwhelming amount of emotions come over you. The thing that got me through that museum, that allowed me to absorb and handle it, was the color white.

As you leave each floor and stage of the museum you travel through starkly white hallways and stairwells. The feeling that these spaces gave me on the day I visited, lifted me up from the dark and distraught stories I was learning about that day. The color white and the lack of images helped cleanse my mind and prepare me for the next stage of the museum and even taking what I learned into the multi-colored world we live in.

Sometimes in life I wish for whiteness, for cleansing, for peace. And there is something to be said that a simple color can stand for purity and calm and bring a mind back into focus.