The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
Natalie's archive of writings from 12-8-2010
"This is the time of year when the world is bathed in the bright twinkling colored lights of the holiday season.
The white snow seems to enhance the magic of the colors as they outline the barns, fences and homes in the country side. Stars atop grain legs give direction to the special season. Lights outline an old elevator as it gives lift to Santa and his reindeer.
My favorite holiday lights are the colors dancing off the twirling ornaments as they hang on our Christmas tree. It seems this is the only time of the year when we have a variety of bright colors on our farm.
We live on a basic black and white farm. We have Holstein cattle, a border collie dog and black and white cats. Our white farm house is framed with black shutters.
The hip-roofed barn is white with a large black and white Holstein cow hanging in front to greet visitors to the snowy yard.
Since we can't seem to add any color in the barn, I thought it would be easy to add color where I could…the house.
I wanted to add a splash of color to our lives by painting the rooms in our house with bright, bold colors as we wrap up our remodeling/addition project.
At first it seemed to be an easy task, but it became almost as difficult as getting a red heifer calf!
Let's start from the beginning. There are only three primary colors…yellow, red and blue.
Everything else is a combination of these colors with black and white.
According to researchers at the Ohio State University, hundreds of colors can be classified into 8 different chromatic categories: red, green, yellow/orange, blue, purple, brown, pink and grue (green and blue).
These colors can then be made into 16 million different combinations. The human eye can see 10 million different colors. I see only 20.
Mark and Katie on the other hand, each have an eye for color. They see the subtle difference in the shades of blue.
I see blue as bright or dull. They see it as blue/gray, gray/blue, blue/green/gray, blue/violet and so forth.
This discrepancy in talent created trouble for my project. Katie picked out three colors for the back hallway/laundry room. It was a great combination of yellow, orange and orange-red/rust. I wanted these bright, bold, "happy" colors in the laundry room because I deal with such dirty, grimy farm clothes.
With color sticks in hand, I headed off to the paint store to pick up my paints. Here is where the trouble began. The colors "we" had chosen are on a paint stick from a different paint company.
I look around and find the "right" colors on their paint sticks and samples.
With paint brushes, rollers and paint in hand, I rush home to add color to our world.
As we colored the freshly primed walls, I start to realize that I may have picked the right colors, but the wrong shades.
The colors went well together, but we couldn't shake off the feeling that the yellow was just too close to the color of calf scours. Now, only a livestock farmer would "see" that in the color yellow.
After two days, we just couldn't adjust to the color. It was time to find another one before the flooring was installed.
Katie was running out of color options and patience. I didn't care for green.
Mark didn't want yellow or purple, but would really like a light red. Light red comes in only one color…pink. That was out too.
The one color we all agreed upon was blue, but which blue? Ocean Breeze, Laguna Blue, Splash, Turquoise Haze, Tear Drop, or Sapphireberry to name a few.
We settled on Mediterranean Seaside Blue, a bright cheery blue that fits with the orange/rust hallway paint. Now as I do laundry, I can "escape" to an exotic vacation, all by a single color.
Fanning out the paint stick colors, I am amazed at all the different names for the various shades of colors.
It must be a real party during happy hour when these descriptive names for thousands of colors are created.
Sometimes we struggle to find fun connected names for our heifers. I don't know what we're going to do when Cracker calves. She comes from Crumb, Cake and Cookie. I guess we're going to have to take chores off and head to happy hour too. Maybe the names will come more easily.
As our house painting project comes to a close, no longer are we living in a black and white world but now Heavenly Pastures, Madonna Blue, Fine Wine and Nomadic Desert color our lives on the farm as Christmas lights twinkle from the tree.
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As their four children pursue dairy careers off the family farm, Natalie and Mark are starting a new adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their farm north of Rice, Minnesota.
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