In Celebration of Brown

Once, my mother made me a brown Easter dress and hat.  I used to have a photograph of me with my basket, sitting atop a stone step, next to a metal garden gnome my father had turned into a light.  As I remember it, I tapped my left hand atop his brown barrel and smiled at the Brownie camera.

I loved that brown dress.  I loved that color.

But no matter how many times I begged for more of the same (my mother made all my clothes until she died when I was 16), she refused to dress me in brown again.  She had decided a blue-eyed blond should not wear brown.  Brown was drab.

Now I can wear brown any time I wish, and I do.  And I can celebrate brown -- in the color of my tea or in the butterflies I find in the forest.  Who would not think them beautiful?