Periwinkle

She was four months old sitting in the back seat with the most adorable toothless grin. Lilli made a delighted sound as the warm summer air blew in from the window and rushed over her face. She stretched her arms, her tiny fingers pointing out and up, up up!  It was such a lovely moment, one that I will never forget.

I looked out and up and saw a sky naked of clouds, and a color that spoke volumes. Light blue with just a hint of lavender, feminine and soft yet bright.

It took me back to my four year old self on Christmas morning. Santa had brought me a Crayola Caddy with a hundred crayons. One by one I inspected each color until I came to periwinkle.

I had never seen the color and it was an incredible discovery.

It was the first of the box to be whittled down to a waxy stump and when I could no longer color with it I asked my mother for another box of crayons.

I had ninety-nine perfectly good crayons for coloring, she said, but the rest just weren’t the same. Violet-Blue was too dark and Robin’s Egg too green. Mommy suggested Hot Magenta and Purple Mountain’s Majesty but those were too bright, too loud and just not right.

I waged a child’s rebellion. I pillaged the crayon boxes of my friends and neighbors robbing them of their periwinkle crayons until I had a collection of five! Stealing my crayon of desire became a habit I never broke.  Even now...I find myself snatching up any stray periwinkles I find laying around.

I looked down at Lilli and laughed. I opened the window a little more and she squealed in glee, and I did too. But it’s not just the warm breeze that tickled me. It was knowing that stashed in my closet were one hundred and nine stolen periwinkle crayons.

Each one of them has a story, a memory, every one of them used at least once.  And now I have another precious moment filled with periwinkle but this one is so special, so dear to me because Lilli was laughing, her simple joy infectious.

We stared out the window together both of us silent but smiling, soaking up the bliss of a  periwinkle sky.