Pink

Have you ever heard of the game where you share two true things and one false thing and the other people in the game are supposed to guess which of the statements is false? From time to time that game has come up in my life and I usually use the same true things, one of which is, “I once had a dog who could talk.” Now, before you come to any extreme conclusions about me, let me tell you the whole story…

You may have noticed that all the little girls in my paintings wear dresses. That’s because, as a child I wore dresses pretty much every day. I just loved them. It was like wearing flowers— they came in such beautiful, happy colors and they reminded me of fairytales, which were my very favorite things in the world. 

One day when I was maybe six or seven years old and about to go to my grandmother’s house, my mom wanted me to wear a dress my grandmother had recently given me. I still remember what it looked like. It was light blue and it had just a few pastel colored butterflies sewn onto it, right up around the collar. Very pretty. 

But I didn’t want to wear the blue dress. I wanted to wear the pink one that was hanging right next to it in my closet. My mom, knowing that my grandmother would be unhappy to find me not wearing the dress she’d recently given me, insisted that I wear the blue one. I begged and said, “Pink!” She shook her head, and said “Blue.” And then, after a few rounds of this, my dog, Lady, who had been sitting on the floor between us, stood up and said, “Pink!” Yes—she really did. It was probably a yawn mixed with a cough or something. But it sounded EXACTLY like the word “pink.” 

My mom and I looked at Lady, who was now trotting out of the room, and then we looked at each other—both of us wide-eyed in shock at this impossible occurrence. My mom said, “Well, I guess you’d better wear the pink one.”

The takeaway here is— when your dog tells you to wear a pink dress, you should wear it, even if it’s going to irritate your grandmother.

~Amy