This issue is dedicated to Carol Peirce

The Colors of Memory

Last week I opened an old shoe box tied up for many years. And, as with Proust tasting again the tea and madeleine, a whole lost world, compounded of colors and light and imagination, spilled out.
     Once upon a time long ago, the little girl I was always played alone on what seemed to me then a big beautiful oriental rug filled with deep colors and swirling patterns. The patterns immediately transformed themselves into many-roomed palaces where, pouring from my hands, the collection of marbles became a company of characters with a king, queen, courtiers, and men and women whose fantastic personalities were matched and even enhanced by their iridescent colors. Like the Bronte children who lived the romance of a band of wooden soldiers, I possessed an ever-continuing story world that came to life as the glowing glass balls entered their carpet kingdom. The king—about three times as large as most marbles—was a “sulfite,” a clear sphere with a white elephant in the center. The queen was a “candy,” a swirl of colors in a glass cage. My most beautiful lady was a shimmery aqua clouded by strands of silvery white, most appropriately called a “cloudy”; my most handsome knight was a deep red “aggie.” Each marble had a place in the story. Romeo-like, the hero loved the only daughter of another proud house. An ambitious courtier betrayed the king and was banished to Ultima Thule at the far end of the rug. A heroine from a poor family—like Cinderella—became the belle of my great yearly ball. And on and on with fairy tales, stories, and my own imaginings, I lived deep in this world for hours on end, forgetting everything outside the boundaries of the reds and blues of the Persian rug.
     There was a window high to the side of our fireplace, and through it in the later afternoon a shaft of sunlight shown down into my marble kingdom. It seemed to me to form a pathway of strands and flecks of gold, in which, from just the right angle, one could actually see the air. This was part of the story, too; for it became a stair into another, paradisiacal world for my imaginary company. I used to suppose that some day I too might climb it. Finally, though, twilight would dim the pathway, the palaces would darken, and I would put away my dream world—but its story would have progressed another day.
     Twilight was a special time for me. My parents would be home, but busy, and I would go out on our front porch and look up into the trees and sky. There were certain evenings—I’ve never seen them again—when the sky and air would turn a particular golden green that would gradually shift to lavender and then purple. Was it leaves after rain, or some shift in the light itself of certain Missouri evenings? I’ve never known and I never asked, for I was quiet and shy; but I’ll never forget them—or the rainbows that sometimes gathered slowly out of them. So they must have been evenings after rains. In my memory now rainbows are always forming out of that mysterious golden green. It seems forever summer there in my imagination with fireflies beginning to appear as the color deepens to lavender.
     Sometimes in the summer we went down to my grandparents’ house in the Ozarks, and I would stay there a week or a month while my parents were away. In the evening I loved to watch the fireflies circling up in that clear air to join the stars. My grandparents still used oil lamps; and nothing was ever more exciting to me than watching, as I came in from the darkening light, the roses and leaves springing up in the globes and the soft, dim flames creating pools of color. Back at home, we had an electric lamp with a plain shade in daylight that came alive with cherry trees when turned on at dark. I puzzled and wondered how it could light up so much more magically even than those smoky oil lamps down in the country.
     Night time, too, had its special meaning then. The moon, laced with high white clouds, appeared a chandelier hanging down from my other world. I loved to read, and my favorite book was George Mac Donald’s The Princess and the Goblin. I always turned to the place where the little princess Irene (also an only child alone) climbed and climbed in the old palace, “putting her little feet one after another in the silver path up the stair,” guided by “the moon shining down from some window high up.” At the very top was the world of her fairy great-great grandmother. And in the center of her dome-shaped ceiling “hung a lamp as round as a ball, shining as with the brightest moonlight.” Irene asks why no one else sees it, but her grandmother simply replies that it doesn’t happen “above five times in a hundred years that anyone does.” I liked to think that the moon I saw was that moon blessing my bed. Sometimes, too, I imagined that my night-light was just like the ones that lured Peter Pan in through casement windows. Other times, though, I looked out at the stars and retold or reinvented for myself myths and stories still living in the constellations.
     Mornings I would wake up and run downstairs to see the most wonderful sight of all. In the dining room window above the sideboard (firmly held in place by nails and cord though seeming to float before the glass) was a very large, Belgian cut-glass cake plate with the same radiant reds and blues as in my afternoon rug. At breakfast time, for about an hour the sun shone right through it, bathing the whole room in brilliant colors—like the room in the Keats poem my father had read to me,

          . . . diamonded with panes of quaint device,
          Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes.

The room became magical to me, as mysterious and strange as the late afternoon light I loved; for the glass plate threw rose-bloom and amethyst over everything. I tried to describe it in a poem of my own:

          I love daddy like a rose of light
          I wish I could see my daddy tonight.

Most of all, though, I felt I was now again inside the special world of my marbles story. I wouldn’t have been surprised to meet some of them transformed into their make-believe characters in that glorious light.
     In another hour, the everyday lights of the real world intrude. I must go to school in winter or out to play among our bushes in summer. Every morning ‘till beyond noon, I longed for three o-clock. Then again, I could get down my box and pour out from it, not just the bright pieces of a child’s game, but the streaming colors of a magical, imaginary world.

Carol Peirce
The Colors of Memory

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