Red and Blue Memories

“This is how you wear red, matey!”
Copyright by WyoJones. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

My mom had two daughters. One of them (not me) had blue eyes and became the wearer of blue. I did not have red eyes but was assigned red as “my” color because, according to my mom, I looked good in red.  

It is possible that, for a time, I had issues with red. There were times in my life when I rejected red and times when I embraced red. 

Whenever I wore red, my mom loved it. Like, seriously loved it. It was almost a Pavlov’s mom thing. 

In this photo, my mom made both dresses. For a long time, our Christmas dresses were a key part of our Christmas gifts. There was a ceremony of trying them on blind-folded (should I admit that sometimes I would try to peek out the bottom of the blindfold and somehow she always knew?) and the grand opening Christmas morning. The only time this changed was when Christmas Day fell on Christmas Eve and we’d open our dresses so we could wear them to church. 

You will note the sassy shoes. We got Sunday shoes twice a year: Christmas and Easter (mom also made our Easter finery. I would dig around and find one of those pictures, but they were not red or blue but trended yellow, pink or white.).

Pretty sure this was red, too.

I wear both red and blue and many other colors these days, but when I wear red I can almost feel my mom’s pleasure. Any issues I had back then with my assigned color have faded with maturity (I hope!) and with perspective. I look back at and I can see the love that went into our dresses. I was too young to really know what I felt, but now I know it was love. 

The perms? They probably meant love, too, but I still hate those. Lol And if my mom were still here and I said that? She’d tell me we looked darling. 

But I still hate the perms. Lol

Perilously yours,

Pauline