On living in the in-between

what is the right color palette for the future?

I’ve always felt this in-between time at the end of August and the start of September to be a particularly melancholic season and it’s even more so this year.

“Ready for coffee?” says my spouse Janyce.

“I am,” I say. It’s 6:19 am and we are awake. Our dog is on the bed sleeping between us and starting to snore. Outside, it’s gradually becoming a Saturday morning at the end of August and we have the windows open. A cool breeze is wafting in over my shoulders and I’m listening to the steady high-pitched hum of the insects in our trees.

Janyce has her laptop open and she’s searching the Ikea website. I have mine open beside her and I’m surfing the Airbnb site. We’re making plans.

“When is Aidan leaving?” says Janyce. “Do you think he and I should try to move the couches now?”

“Yeah, I think you should get him up to do it before he goes out today,” I say.

This week, we spent one day in Chatham working and making appointments with contractors to remodel the family cottage for next summer’s rental season. It feels like time to get moving on something again. At the end of the day, we stopped at our favorite take-out restaurant to pick up burrata and beefsteak tomatoes, along with a couple of mason jars filled with a cloudy cocktail aptly named heavy weather, and drove to the beach to lay our blanket in the dunes. We sat up high amidst the beach grasses, looking out over the expanse of the bay, far enough away from the vacationing families gathered together in chair circles on the shore, and sipped our drinks on a quiet evening as the light began to fade out over the water.

“Wow, look at the color of the sky” said Janyce, as we walked back up the middle path that cuts between the beach and the marsh and leads up a mile or so to a quaint lighthouse. I wasn’t looking at the sky, but was noticing instead how the rose hips matched the red frame of the lighthouse window, trying to capture the perfect shot with my iphone.

“What is that color exactly?” I said. It’s a color that only happens at dusk on the Cape, hanging in a small stripe on the horizon blended between the other colors. It tricks the eye so you never know quite where it begins and where it ends.

I read this beautiful meditation recently in The Paris Review all about the color Periwinkle. In “Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk” the author Katy Kelleher muses on this hard-to-describe shade of blue/violet that grows profusely in her mother’s Massachusetts backyard. “Few hues are more beguiling and more reviled than this grouping, the last stop on the rainbow” Her essay is brimming with history, folklore, and paintings. It’s the kind of essay that makes you want to enter the woods with a sketchbook and box of colored pencils.

We have a dark house to remodel. It has tiny colonial paned windows positioned to miss both the setting and the rising of the sun, and the boxy rooms are closed off to each other. There can be a certain charm in the sheltered vibe of this tiny shingle-style cottage in the middle of untamed ivy vines and scrubby beach pine trees, but only if we do it right.

“Are you busy?” says Janyce, who shows me a picture of the same space saver Ikea sleeper couch we slept in during our last vacation. The fabric is dark, important for a rental couch I think, but will be another object potentially sucking in all the available light in an already dark and moody room.

“Yeah that’s the same one,” I say. It could work. And I let out a sigh.

I’ve always felt this in-between time at the end of August and the start of September to be a particularly melancholic season and it’s even more so this year. There is a scary election on the horizon and another possible long winter without people again. My son is getting ready to leave us and return to Tennessee, to resume a life he had in what feels like a million years ago already. “Mom, I’ve made my decision and I’m okay with it,” he said. “It’s time to go back.” I think we are throwing ourselves into this project right now not only out of necessity for the rental income to come, but also as a diversion. At least for me.

I turn back to my listing of current Airbnb properties in Chatham and scroll down the page. People go on vacation to the Cape to be uplifted and bathed in sunshine and hopefulness, whitewashed in symbols of seashells and boat buoys, and comforted by the pink hues of the stunning Cape cod sunsets. But these things do not adequately capture the spirit of our house at all, nor do we want them. Like Kelleher, though, it might do us some good to immerse ourselves in color, perhaps revisit the Impressionists, and meditate on the symbolism of renewal in the various shades of green, something in between the two extremes of dark and light.