Fifty Shades of Neutral

There are still bits and small strips of masking tape clinging to the edges where the floor meets the ceiling in the front room, remnants of the painting spree my husband had embarked upon years ago. He was meticulous about the tape; he didn't want to make a mess.

The front room: once a dining room where nobody ever dined, then an office where nobody really ever did any work, then a TV room where I would lay on the orange love seat until I fell asleep (usually two minutes) and then the cable box just stopped working anyway. Mostly, it was just where the dogs hung out,  curled up together on the big orange chair by the window so they could keep watch. Now, with one dog gone and the surviving one blind and the cable out, there is nothing to watch and no real reason to curl up with anybody. I usually come home to find Manny on the couch, awakened by the hopeful sound of the garage door opening, his tail wagging tentatively until he is certain it's the lady with the food. Neither one of us notices or cares about the yellow walls or the ancient tape in the corners.

As my new handyman, Cal, becomes more deeply entrenched each day in preparing our nineteen year old house (was it really hardly finished yet when we moved in?) for sale, no stone goes unturned, no chip of colored paint goes unnoticed. Everything must now fade to shades of neutral. The laundry room can remain tangerine (it's just a laundry room), and the living room turned dining room can remain the still trendy rich forest green that provides such a strong backdrop to the Edward Hopper print on the wall and the mint green chairs I just had to have, but the rest, unless it is the deep taupe that runs sporadically through the house, must go. The citrusy peach that is my very own handiwork in the master bathroom (a decorator friend, trying to be polite, once suggested it was a bit too Caribbean); the sickly pale yellow in the front room that has had so many incarnations and still doesn't know what to call itself but, gosh darn it, not a speck of yellow paint got on the ceiling; and the bright blue in the kitchen, so stark against the nineties style white cabinets and floor tile, the lone neighborhood survivors of almost two decades of epidemic upgrades to dark wood and stone tiles with rivulets of pink running through them.

My teenage daughter is vaguely aware of the home cleanup effort going on around her, and tries not to let it get in her way. But when she saw the six paint swatches taped to the blue walls by the pantry, she was offended. She likes our blue kitchen. I don't know if I like the blue so much as expect it. It's like an old shoe, really, a little bit nasty but comforting, something other people might sneer at even though it reminds me I am home. I explained to my daughter that we had to neutralize. I have promised Cal I would pick my favorite swatch; together my daughter and I agreed on the least offensive of the six. I have promised Cal I would dig up the leftover cans of taupe so he could touch things up. I think they are in the garage, along with the bright kitchen blue. I say it's the cold that's keeping me from dragging them inside, but I think I'm fibbing a little.

Maybe I won't object though, if Cal replaces the old masking tape in the front room with a better adhesive. Maybe there's a silver lining to draining the color from our walls; maybe, with the right paint, and better tape, things will be a little less messy.