I am mad for color. If I were going to stay in the house I am living in now, I would paint the living-room orange. Not too bright an orange — not tangerine orange! — but orange nevertheless. I have a red sofa, so the idea of a red couch with orange background practically makes me swoon.

When I taught school, there would always be an eighth-grade girl or two who just had to write their compositions in colored ink or pencil, one paragraph one color and the next another. That was fine with me.

I remember that the head of English for the whole Springfield, Massachusetts school district at the time wanted to make a law that all compositions had to be written in blue ink. This was appalling to me. Why take away the little pleasure that using color gave these girls? I was just happy that the children would write a composition. Who cared what color it was in? I would have quit school teaching before I complied with such a ruling, and this is one thing I fought the Springfield school system about to the very end.

If I could, I would make every paragraph of this composition I’m writing in this blog a different color. But this is all really an aside, for I meant to write about the lovely world of color and not school rulings.

The summer after my first year of teaching, I started to write an English grammar book. I was going to make it easy and lovely for children by making each part of speech a different color and so on. I had great plans for this book. I remember lying on my stomach on a blanket at the beach, and, with colored pencils in hand, I started writing this colorful grammar book. I never finished it though. I couldn’t quite get a color system to come out right. It got complicated instead of simple, and I got stuck and couldn’t take it all the way, but I still think it was a great idea.

Way back at the beginning of Godwriting™, I would also hear messages from Christ and Mother Divine and once or twice from an Archangel or two. I was going to have God’s words in blue, Mother Divine’s in magenta, and, best as I remember, Christ’s words were going to be a subtle green. I have no idea what I intended for the Archangels. My words would have been a dark gray rather than stark black. I thought this would be a simple way to distinguish the speaker without saying who was speaking at the particular moment.

I discovered it wasn’t helpful though because I would sometimes not remember who was which color, so, once again, what I thought would be simple became complicated.

But blue for God has stayed, and that’s the way I like it.