Red, Gold and Green

“Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dreams –
Red, gold and green – red, gold and green!” – Culture Club, “Karma Chameleon”

Way back in Ought and Twelve, we bought our second condo at Cascade Village, which we sold just 2.5 years later (the second of the six “retirement homes”, including the one that we are building now).

When we walked out of the title company after signing the papers, I walked into a nearby art shop, and bought a metal ski poster that I wanted to put into the new house. It looked exactly like this one, except it said “Durango Mountain Colorado” instead of “The Canyons Utah” –

Obviously, this is a stock poster that gets resold at many destination resorts, but I neither knew nor cared about that – it was a whim, and I was obeying the whim.

Immediately I got an earful from my sweetie pumpkin – “Why did you buy that?…you spent how much for that?….We didn’t discuss that. Where do you think you’re going to put it?” – apparently, she was nonplussed.

Then some things happened – the first was that I went to the new condo, and put the poster up on the mantle. A day or two later, Ethel had a big skiing accident and smashed up her shoulder and collarbone pretty badly; she had to have surgery, and went on pain pills.

While she was on pain pills, we asked a friend – a contractor – to come over and discuss some of the work that we would want to have done on the place – eventually. But one thing we wanted immediately – to have the bank of cabinets above the stove and stove counter removed, so that Ethel could see the mountains while standing in her kitchen. So Jeff started on that, I went off to my home office, and Ethel took up residence in the recliner in the living room (she lived in that recliner for weeks; she could sleep in that better than in the bed, and it made it easier for her to get up and down).

So for the next few weeks, I was working and Ethel was sitting downstairs with her pain pills, the contractor, a TV apparently continuously tuned to HGTV, and a laptop. She kept suggesting things to the contractor, and he kept doing them – and she kept ordering stuff that she saw on HGTV and having it delivered.

I kept coming downstairs and finding walls removed and fixtures and appliances replaced.

THIRTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS LATER, the condo was remodeled.

And, of course, the new surfaces had to be repainted, so Ethel had the local Sherwin Williams scan three of the colors in the metal poster that she had started out hating. Those colors were the red from the scarf, the green from the hat, and the gold in the background.

We’ve now used those three colors – shading the gold (the predominant color) one way or the other for different lighting – in our last four homes; the current gold is Dakota Wheat, and the red and green are Foxy and Relentless Olive.

I’ve been busy this week adding the red and green to the accent walls, while the contractors are painting everything else with the gold. (This is not the way that I intended to spend my retirement, but then, I’m not running my life).

Funny how those little things become mainstays in our lives. George Ritter saying that he had run a marathon and gone skiing changed how I’ve spent my free time for the last three decades; somebody starting a mailing list in Texas for runners became most of my persistent social life for twenty-five years, and became the springboard for my turning to triathlon. Seeing an extremely cute brunette across the room at an NA dance in late 1986 changed – well, pretty much everything else in my life 🙂

And a $99 metal stock ski poster became the palette within which we live our lives.

I thought Ethel might be waffling on using these colors in the new house, so the other night, I thanked her for not changing to new stuff. She allowed as to how she couldn’t find anything that she liked better. Well, neither can I 🙂