Pick your Wicker Basket battles ~ January 7, 2004

David Heiller

Blue Corn. Grape Harvest. Barn. Blue Hour. Harvest Gold.

It sounds like a poet describing a Van Gogh painting.

Wicker Basket. Mannered Gold. Venture Violet. Surf Green.

Or maybe an Amish farmer after his first trip to Bissen’s Tavern.

But it’s none of the above. The answer is C, as in Cindy, at a paint store.

This is our electrician wiring a light 
in the entryway. But mostly it is a picture of 
the color of the entryway/kitchen.
It still pleases me.

Yes, those All-American images are colors of paint that are starting to adorn the walls of our new home, and picked out mostly by my fine wife, Cindy.

Tim Serres, our plumber, summed it up best when he took a look at the bedroom that our daughter, Malika, is claiming. “So who’s the Vikings fan?” he asked. Tim, like all good plumbers, has a way of cutting to the chase.

Sorry Tim, that’s not good old Viking purple. That’s Venture Violet, a color that Malika picked out. She takes after her mother.

And that blue in the downstairs bedroom isn’t blue after all. It’s “Wicker Basket” (upper case letters, please).

AND that bedroom color, it’s definitely a shade of red, but guys don’t name paint colors, so it isn’t called “dark red,” it’s called “Grape Harvest” I’m going to spend the next 30 years (hopefully) looking at Grape Harvest” when I wake up.

It may sound like I’m complaining, but I’m not. I got used to Grape Harvest after about a day. And I’ll be ΟΚ with the rest of Cindy’s rainbow when all is said and done, because I trust Cίndy. She is good at decorating, and I have learned to let the Wookie win when it comes to things like that.

But guys are different than gals, if I may make a sweeping generalization, and building a house brings that to diamond sharpness.

Our builder, John Holzworth, reminded me of it the other day. We were standing in the purple glow of Malika’s bedroom, talking about the house.

“I could live in a house this size,” John said, meaning not the size of our entire house, but the size of the bedroom. “I’m never in the house. I’m always in the shop”

If you’ve ever been in John’s shop, you know why that’s the case. Good old Janny Janikowski would have drooled over John’s shop. It’s better equipped than many a high school, and his refrigerator could lure a few customers from the above-mentioned Bissens.

But his point was still sound: guys don’t need all that space, just like they don’t need four different shades of blue.

But guys have learned something since their Neanderthal days. Pick your battles. When Josephine Neanderthal wanted a bigger cave, her knuckle-dragging significant other moved to France and found her one. And when she got tired of the bare walls, she took out her paints and drew some funny looking bison and antelope and men with spears on the walls and ceilings.

I can hear their conversation.

“Hmm, good picture woman”

“T’anks:”

“How you make that color?”

“Mix clay, oil, sumac.”

“What call it?”

“That Harvest Grape:”

“Hmm. And how you make that one?”

“Mix sand, fat, berry. Me call it Wicker Basket.”

“Ugh. Me going out to workshop”