This Will Be My Defense

When Husband and I got married he was living in a sweet little house roughly the size of my current (small) closet. But because I loved him, I thought the house was adorable and romantic, even though I immediately had Opinions. My first Opinion concerned the color of the house.

He was getting ready to paint, and he asked what color he should use.

"Yellow," I told him, "with gray trim."

Just like that. I had an Opinion, and I shared that Opinion, and we bought yellow paint. We will fast-forward through when we were scraping the old siding and it was 140 degrees in the shade and I first heard the phrase "A job worth doing is worth doing well" come out of his mouth. That is not relevant to this story, but it was a learning experience for both of us as I realized I was marrying a perfectionist and he realized he was marrying someone who would frequently say "Fine. Then we are HIRING someone to do this."

When the person we had hired finished painting we stood back and gazed at the darling little yellow-and-gray house. It was so pretty! So fresh! So romantic! But then Husband pulled his avocado green Buick into the driveway next to the house.

Oh. My. Gosh. Suddenly, rather than looking pretty and fresh and romantic, all of the green tones in the yellow popped to the foreground in solidarity with that car, and immediately the color of our house appeared roughly the same color as the face of someone with both morning sickness and jaundice. Kind of yellow, but with a green under-tinge that smelled of death. We gasped in horror, called the painter, and had it re-painted in a shade didn't turn evil when the Buick was near.

I tell that story because Husband and I have been painting another bedroom, this time the one with dinosaur wallpaper. (Yes, I do know how old my children are. They were even sadder than I was to get rid of those dinosaurs.)

Because our last foray into choosing paint colors really went quite well, and Husband's office turned out absolutely gorgeous* in spite of his apprehensions about the paint darkness and the non-white ceiling, I wasn't even going to consult him about the color of this room which he will only enter to make sure sheets are clean for the next guest. (He does all the laundry in the House on the Corner. In nearly every way I married a saint.) I showed him chips of several possibilities, and we discussed them thoroughly--very, very thoroughly--and then he said "You know what? I trust you. You pick the color, and I'll help you paint."

Still, there he was beside me in the hardware store when I ordered paint.

"Are you sure?" he said anxiously. "Don't you think that may be too dark? How about this color? Really? Have you thought about how it will look when we put that quilt up next to it--is it going to--"

I stopped him with a hiss louder than is usually heard in Hometown Hardware.

"Do. Not. Confuse. Me. Just do not." And I swept out of there with my two cans of paint as if I were the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey.

But I had my own doubts as late as this morning, when we put paintbrush to wall. The color went on rather rosy, and I was prepared to change shades for the second coat but it dried perfectly, to exactly what I had in my mind. I'm sure Husband will agree when he sees it, or at least he will say he agrees.

Because he knows that when I finally snap and murder him, it will be over paint colors, and the homicide will be justifiable.

But that's just my Opinion.


*I know I owe you pictures of that office, but I can't find my camera. It's under the drop cloths somewhere. It will turn up.