Colors

My window faces the West end of Jiu Valley, and come mid afternoon the sun embraces my living space, blazing my stained wood bunk into light. Earlier this Sunday morning I rose and shuffled down the icy hall to our water closet to freshen for the day. I paused in my daily preparations seeing something I had never rightly took in before; the faucet on which my hand rested was a bright banana yellow. Unusual. And as I turned to my right the toilet paper caught my eye, bubble gum pink it waved at me with the draft that whispered through the door. I smiled, my sister Roo would be so excited to have coloured toilet paper, pink for a princess, and an exotic treat to the plain white ‘Charmin’ of home.

Exotic, that reminds me, on my host parents return from a short excursion to Italy they brought me back a little gift: Vegetable soap enclosed in a sweet cardboard box, a turtle stone on a cord necklace, shaving cream and a plain pink t-shirt. The shirt is the gift that stands out most to me. Although I was thankful I was puzzled by it at first with its Wal-Mart comparative quality, but it has come to represent something very different to me now. During communism everything was meticulously filtered to portray exactly what the party wished it to say. Women were deprived of feminine products, fashion, and many basic essentials needed for a functional life. Any sort of information on the outside world came into Romania by means of the black market.  After the fall of communism the process was still slow for bringing fashionable media into the country, but anything exotic was greatly valued, regardless of quality or name brand. Though fashion is a little more current, the prestige of exotic products still resonates as coming from a higher level. My bright pink t-shirt is from Milano, Italia; fashion centre of the world.

On our fall break trip to Italy we spent our last three nights in Milano. But unlike the majority of tourists our focus was a little less fashion centred and more on special treats. Our favourite stops were the flavour filled gelateria’s and the little market shops we’d stumble upon. The Saturday in Milan was the best day of the trip. We had heard about a big market that runs every week, and when we got there we realized that ‘big’ was an understatement for this market. It stretched the span of a long street selling everything you could imagine and in every colour. We found a honey stand that sold flavoured honeys in colourful varieties; we bought lemon, red strawberry, melon, orange mandarin and others. Scarves billows along the line of tents, their intricate colourful designs drawing you in to buy them, we caved in oh too many times to their charms. Colours and fashion of so many places tell us stories, some of struggling times or trials, others of beauty in life and celebration. The colours of Lupeni, my yellow faucet and pink toilet paper will always cause me to smile, remembering the mismatched way the people of our hometown made things fit together; and the colours of the gifts will remind me of celebrated life, and all the beautiful varieties it comes in.