11.17.2005

Caribbean Pink

The other day I was reading this book my mom had suggested: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. It's an amazing novel. A quick read too. I would love to go into the litterary details of the book, but it leave us both better off to just have you go and read it. Here's a short conversation between a girl named Lily, and August, an elderly Beekeeper.

"There is one thing I don't get," I said.
"What's that?"
"How come if your favorite color is blue, you painted your house so pink?"
She laughed. "That was May's doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it make herfeel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, 'Well, this is the tackiest color I've ever seen, and we'll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May's heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.'"
"All this time I just figured you liked pink," I said
She laughed again. "You know, some things don't matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart -- now, that matters. The whole problem with people is--"
"They don't know what matters and what doesn't," I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.
"I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters , but they don't choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters."

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