When I am weary, I remember a picture of my grandmother, Mary Uilani Kaumeheiwa Sodetani. She is sitting on the puʻunene with her feet up Her long legs stretched out toward the ʻAuʻau Channel Her blue bandana Her long, brown arms clasped gently around her stomach Her eyes looking into her beloved yard. Once as a young child, after some nasty comments my grandfather said to her, and after his swearing that stuck out to my young ears as sounding very much like the way my father talked to my mother, I asked grandma, "why do you let him talk to you like that?" Her eyes were tearless, steady. She looked at me and the sides of her eyes crinkled and her mouth, in the side smirk said, "I just let it go one ear, and come out the other." I thought as a kid it was a way of forgetting. As she stared into her yard in that picture, I always thought it was what Sandra Cisneros described in House on Mango Street, "My Name," She looked out the window her whole life, the
Photo by Daian Gan Pexels Author's note: what color is nothing? was the prompt that led me to this rabbit hole. I'm not sure what I want to do with this. I am thinking I would like to know what unexpected lessons others have learned about themselves through teachers. I feel like the dumb girly is a different piece or I need to weave it better into the end in order to justify the space I give to the dumb girly thing. In 7th grade art class, Ms. Glazer taught us about mixing water colors, the color wheel and the potential of water. She also told me that I was not an artist. It stopped my random doodling on the margins of my Holly Hobbie journal. It made me hesitant when I had to take industrial arts in 8th grade because we had to design a t-shirt for silk screening. How do I design on silkscreen when I have lost the ability to art? Despite my lack of talent in art, I did remember that black can represent the presence of all colors. White is colorless. But at the end of the se