Day 3: Picture Your October

There is this picture I have next to my reading chair that brings me great joy. I colored it in kindergarten and no matter where I have lived that picture has gone with me. For years it hung on the closet door in my childhood bedroom. The white paper backing slowly turned yellow. The paper curled and ripped in places. One day I discovered the magic that is “The Laminator” and I preserved this piece of my childhood in melted plastic.

I still remember the day I colored it. It is a standard size piece of paper. On it there is a rainbow with a happy sunshine in the mostly middle. There are two puffy clouds one either end of the rainbow and the whole thing is stretched across a half moon section of a town. We had to cut out each of these components and glue them to our paper and then color them. I was not a very good cutter outer so it took me some time. Then I had to select just the right colors for my rainbow. Some genius decided that this rainbow only had 4 bands instead of 6, so I had to decide which ones got the ax (sorry orange and purple). Next I decided that if the sunshine was happy then my clouds had to be happy too. So I drew faces on them. Frankly they both look like they are angry napping but what can you do?

Next came the town. There is a school, stores, fire station, apartment buildings, regular houses, a park, roads, parking lots and a pool. I painstakingly selected just the right brown for the roads. I decided that it was fall in my tiny town (of course) and all the trees needed to be a different fall color. I chose a grey for the roofs and I bartered, begged and pleaded with another kid to use his super fabulous florescent orange. It was a magic crayon I tell you. I still think about it. So there I was happily coloring along and the teacher said, ok, time to finish up. I had about 90% of my town left to color. I raised my hand and explained my dilemma. My teacher who was normally the sweetest woman on the face of the earth was a little perturbed that I wasn’t further along and said that I needed to hurry up and finish because (I think) we were putting them up for parent’s night that night and an unfinished paper was unacceptable. Sooooo, I decided that my town had boroughs, like in New York. To show this I picked a crayon at random and just started coloring the rest of the blank sections in large swaths. There is the blue zone, the florescent orange zone, a whole lot of red and a tiny bit of green. I was rather proud of my solution to the problem.

My teacher came by again, looked at my paper and was not enamored with my quick fix. My parents weren’t all that impressed either. I was told I should have colored things individually and taken my time because it just looked messy. 35 years later I’m still mad about it. Oh the injustice of it all. But at least I got to use the florescent crayon.

So what does my childhood coloring trauma have to do with October? Welllll, when you looked at all the pictures from everyone in my class, they all looked different. They were the same picture. Everyone had the same color pallet to choose from, but it showed our creativity. October is like that. We all have the same 31 days, but what we choose to do with them shows our individuality. Some people curl up and get cozy, some like to look for scares. Some like pumpkins some don’t. Some like candy, some really don’t care. Some people like to take one last trip before winter sets in, while others wait till Thanksgiving to go out and about. There is no wrong way to celebrate October. Decorate with pumpkins or bloody fangs, or don’t decorate at all. Wear orange and black pom poms on your head with a bee costume or put on a cozy sweater. Sip a pumpkin spice something, or find some apple butter. How you find your joy is up to you. How are you planning on celebrating October?