I wrote this earlier in the month, but am only now getting it loaded. It’s just a very busy time of the year, and I still enjoy hand writing my posts first.

Some years ago I had a significant birthday. You know the one with the key. A birthday that a few centuries before would’ve seen me labelled with the ‘spinster’ title.
I was given many lovely gifts some of which i still have to this day. One of the gifts was a towel with my name embroidered on it. An apricot towel. It was all good until the gift giver told me that they always tried to match the colour of the towel to the recipient. Who, hold on, me? Apricot?

I mean, my daily wardrobe consisted of red, blue, purple, fluro, black…bright colours, out-there combinations. I was (and still am to a certain extent) an outgoing, realistic, unsentimental, often brash person. Where the heck did apricot come in? Apricot represents old-fashioned, traditional, lady-like. Everything I was not. I thought “This person doesn’t know me” and got offended.

Fast forward a number of years (the number is irrelevant). I am less out-going, still a realist and often brash, but now I am abundantly sentimental! I still like bright colours but my combinations and ways of using them have become more understated and classic in leaning. I love reading older novels. Much of what is written today is full of the nasty side of life; superficial and dysfunctional relationships and/or sex. It’s not that the older novels are not realistic, it’s just that the focus is not on the darker side of life, but on the better.

I relish older movies too – and the newer animated ones – for their simple, uncomplicated enjoyment.

I will tear up at sad stories, happy stories and my heart strings are pulled by frail elderly. Sad TV adverts will get me teary. People dying in real life, on TV or in books make me cry.

I may not get emotional enough to cry about anything in my own life (once in a blue moon); but others can move me to tears very quickly.

Apricot is not a bad colour. My towel is faded now, only a hint of the apricot colour remains. Yet I still look at that towel and remember the indignation I felt. It has however been borne in me over the last year or two, that maybe it was not the gift giver who did not know me. Maybe I did not know myself.

#21st #towel #apricot