I browsed through the used merchandise in the second-hand store. A chipped coffee mug here, a stained t-shirt there. Everything was in varying shades of brown, or at least had stains that were.
I was in the store to pick up some yarn so I could practice making granny squares - my latest crafty addiction - when I saw them: a little bag of bright yellow beads.
They literally stopped me in my tracks. In a building full of brown, stained, broken things, these beads shone. Slowly I reached my hand out to the little bag of yellow beads and drew them to me for a closer look.
Yellow surprises me. In a world full of shades of neutral colors - mostly gray - induced by my diagnosis of depression, yellow pierces through them with a gentle yet magnificent power like the sun pierces through to meet our gaze on a cloudy day. Every other color imaginable - blue, purple, red, green, orange, etc. - can melt into a neutral color depending on the shade and simply turn… well… ordinary. Not yellow. Yellow always stands separate: proud and humble all at the same time.
Yellow is my hero. Yellow is what pulls me back when the gray threatens to swallow me whole. And to think, it all started with those sunflowers when I was a child.
All children growing up in the “Bible Belt” have attended Vacation Bible School at the local church in the summer at least once in their lives. And every year, there is always “craft time” where you make paper dolls of Jesus and glue popsicle sticks together to make crosses. This particular summer, however, around the time I was in elementary school, we planted sunflower seeds.
Ms. Carolyn, our craft teacher, handed each of us a small styrofoam cup and instructed us to fill it with potting soil, which sat in a bag on the sidewalk (tonight’s craft was outside because some church elders were a little too worried that we would spill dirt on the church carpet). After we had filled our cups, we took our finger and made a tiny little hole in the top of the dirt about half an inch deep into which I plopped three smooth, black sunflower seeds. Gently I filled in the hole, watered my seeds, and wrote my name with a marker on my cup so I could find it again when I picked it up to take home at the end of the night.
A while later after I had brought my craft home, I noticed something different about my cup of dirt - there was a tiny little green thing poking up. I called for my mother, and she suggested I put it in the back yard so it would have room to grow. I got my little shovel and went out in the yard beside our silver shed where I spent my early years playing make-believe with my sister. I dug a hole, dumped my cup of dirt in, and went back inside. I don’t know how that little flower survived, but somehow it did. Even my dad noticed it without anyone telling him and made sure when he mowed the lawn to go around my little flower - such a great act of love.
At the end of the summer, I had a few scrawny sunflowers that stood about four feet tall, and I was in love. That was when my love for sunflowers - and especially for yellow - began.
I stood in the little second-hand store in Dayton beside Bi-Lo, holding the yellow beads in my hand, not able to put them back to be swallowed up in a cardboard box of brown and gray, stained and broken things.
I was so proud of those little yellow beads when I showed them to my husband, but he just smiled and shook his head - completely at a loss to my strange ways, yet accepting of them - even loving them. Loving me.
Quietly, yet profoundly, those yellow beads sit in a plain white teacup on my kitchen counter. They make the whole room smile.
