Color My World

Color. Color is omnipresent. What can life be without color? You feast your eyes on color. They are descriptive, beautiful, and mean different things to different people. I don’t know about you, but I love colors, especially various shades of blue: Royal blue, turquoise, teal, sapphire, and sky blue. It’s hard to pick which is my favorite.

But with the eye disorder I live with, the rods and cones are dying off. Ever so slowly, the killer DNA genes send self-destructive messages to the rods and cones, snuffing them out one by one. The cones are photoreceptors for reading, seeing color, stationary things or people, details of objects during the day, looking at pictures, and recognizing familiar faces while the rods help you see movement, night vision, and peripheral vision.

I have a hard time determining if a color is black, navy, or even a rich dark brown, the kind of brown that is so dark that I could go cross-eyed trying to determine whether it's black or dark brown.

My oldest daughter, a fashion police wannabe, recently informed me that brown is the “new black.” How appropriate! If I have a hard time telling the difference between black and dark brown, it’s perfect. It is my “new black.” How about making olive the “new beige?” That is another color that is hard for me to determine. I have to layer them one on top the other in order to see the difference. Even then, sometimes it’s hard.

There is a special device, though, that can tell you what color things are so you can mix and match your clothes. I was envisioning having only jeans, black, white, khaki, and tan pants so that any top can match when and if I lose all my colors. I don't know how well I will hear the device "talk" though.

They say that red is the last to go. It’s such a vibrant color. I hope that it doesn’t get to that point. Life would be pretty dull without color.

God willing, I’d like to retain as much of the colors in my world as possible.