So yes, I know: buttercups and warm lights, the shadows on a polar bear and pollen. Lemon curd sauce and angel pie, the afternoon light glowing in the living room. Gold on my fingers, the tint of big leaf maples in September. Bananas, egg yolks, buttered corn. Caution signs, dandelions, honey bees.

Even so. The color is a problem for me. I delayed considering it here. My mother loved yellow because as a child with yellow hair she was told she should never wear the color. She wanted to wear yellow to spite that notion. But I have no memory of my mother in yellow.

Mom washed a white Orlon sweater and laid it out on a rack in the sunshine to dry and it turned yellow. “Ruined,” she said. Old bruises turned yellow. After a filling, I had a bruise sliding down the side of my face for weeks. Once the blood in that bruise was turning yellow, people kept asking if I had been hit or run into something.

My second baby was yellow with jaundice and I cried on drives back and forth to the hospital to feed him, blinders on his eyes, lying uncurled under billy-lights. Would;t he have been better off lying bare against my chest?

The pages in my books can be said to have yellowed, but the color is perhaps more orange than pure spectrum yellow. Yellow has some baggage in my life. Nothing dreadful, but a minor prejudice.

My grudge against yellow dates to Hazel Koenig’s design class my freshman year at the University of Washington. We were working with poster paints, creating color wheels of tints and shades. My yellow looked pure enough. When white paint was added, I created a gradient of pale and paler yellow tints. But when I added black, the shades of yellow were green. That’s because a super concentration of blue or green or even purple is used to produce paint that appears black. The flaw was not in the yellow pigment, but in the black. I wanted darker yellow and I found shades of olive and laden instead.

My grandmother painted her beach house yellow inside. The bedroom walls were two or three shades of intense blue with white carpet on the floor. Everything else was yellow—walls, carpet, appliances, even the Mixmaster in the kitchen. I think she was after a cheerful color, a sunny yellow on the cloudy coast. I have tried palest gray-pink and taupe and green and rose, in pursuit of the same effect. Now the walls are pale lavender and I avoid yellow.

Except, I do not avoid yellow. I use it, the complement of purple, in weaving and quilts. I am cautious and yet there is is again and again, those yellows and golden hues.

Left is an early version of the last quilt I pieced, “Rain,” the colors laid out and unstitched. I wanted mostly tints and shades of gray, but here I tried pinks, reds, and maroons played off against purple, a range of colors on a ground of mottled-gray. It did not work for me. I lifted them all, cut new strips. The whole project was laid out on our bedroom carpet for weeks while I was changing my mind about color.

Above is the layout I settled on after Gary and I had been stepping around the edges of carpet for over a week. After several shifts, I made my choice about color. Yellow sunshine raying from the upper right where you will find it in many children’s drawings of the sky. The sun in upper right smiling down on the green grass and hopeless perspective of a six year old artist learning to use poster paints and crayons.

We always draw the sun as a yellow disk, the moon as white. The gold of day and the silver of night, though even in the midnight blue sky, the moon too is gilded.

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