I wrote this piece in 9th grade.
My grandmother was a most irregular person. Born in Oregon to a family that had lived there since the opening of the Oregon Trail one hundred years before, she was first distinguished by her purple skin. How this came about no one quite knows, for it was not a giant bruise as some had originally thought. My family was not fond of paint, though some later accused them of using it to maintain my grandmother’s skin. I do not totally blame the neighbors for this accusation, because her skin looked like something right out of a comic book, a purple only found in fictional drawings of aliens. Not even artificial candies had a purple worthy of my grandmother’s skin. I always used to ask my grandmother if she was embarrassed about her skin, but she would always laugh and me and reply,
“Honey, I could not be more proud of my skin if it was a fine as Marilyn Monroe’s. I may not be a beauty queen, but I am still the finest looking lady with purple skin in the whole United States of America.” Every time she said this, I would think to myself that, purple or not, I did not know a woman with a more confident and queenly bearing than my grandmother.
For all that she loved her purple skin, however, my grandmother always thought the color purple sucked. For her whole life, she tested all foods with the color purple, from eggplants to grapes to beets. Once when I ask her to have a piece of chocolate cake we bought for my birthday she refused, saying it looked “toxic”. When I implored her that it was just dark chocolate; she replied that it was “as purple as the sunset” and stormed off to her study. Not incidentally, her favorite color was orange, and she flaunted it in numerous ways. Despite the relative cold of high desert New Mexico, an orange tree grew in her backyard and even in the dead of winter, we would go over to grandma’s house to find a big bowl of oranges. Carrots were another favorite of hers, and she was always lavishing us with beastly carrot cakes. She was a beast at making carrot juice and anything else she could think of. While most of the houses on her block were painted light brown, her’s was bright neon orange. Every year when springtime came, my grandfather would suggest to her that they let it fade a little just for one year, and every year she would tell him that if he stayed home and tended the garden and the yard that he could paint the house whatever color he wanted.
My grandfather was never quite as happy about my grandmother’s skin. He said he was attracted to her at first because she held her head high and had the most regal bearing of any girl in their small Montana town. By the third year of their marriage, anyhow, he was talking to local doctors and dropping hints that she should look into a way to color her skin more “normally”. My grandmother would always reply that she did not believe in tampering with her body given by God. One day my grandfather came home from work with a bottle of skin-colored powder tucked underneath his shirt That night while my grandmother lay asleep, my grandfather took this powder, which he had specially ordered from Seattle, and began massaging it into the beautiful purple skin of my grandmother. Unfortunately for him, the powder had to be made wet in order to work, and when he tried to smear the wet substance on he found that it stuck much more readily to his fingers than it did to my grandmother’s face. In desperation he tried to apply some dry powder and lick it on. But still the powder only stuck to his tongue. My grandmother awakened from a dream to be confronted by a cream colored version of my grandfather with strange pink powder smeared all over his tongue. After she finished laughing, she asked him to leave the house for a couple days, and when he returned with purple flowers, she let him back in on the condition that he never bother her again.
The strangest thing about my grandmother was that she didn’t bruise like normal people do. She once told me that the color of her blood was red just like everyone else’s, but I never saw it because she always took immaculate care of her body and her appearance. Once when she slipped on a liquid solution my brother had spilled on her kitchen floor, she came down hard on her elbow. It continued to bother her for days until finally she swallowed her pride and took a trip to see the doctor. As the doctor was examining her, he said that with a fall of that nature it was almost impossible not to bruise something, and was rather astounded that he didn’t see any change in the color of my grandmother’s skin. When we took her home she spent the whole car ride muttering about how she didn’t need to see a doctor to tell her to ice her arm and relax. She laughed when we said it was strange that she hadn’t bruised. “Well, ladies, I’m purple, how COULD you see the bruise!” We laughed at her antics then, but it was much more serious when she went back to the hospital five years later, complaining of stomach pain. When she collapsed into a coma after three days in the hospital, doctors told us that they could have solved the problem much earlier if they could have seen the internal bleeding that had been caused by a ruptured spleen. As it was, they were too late. I lost my grandmother 24 hours later.
Ever since that incident it has been difficult for me to speak about her, because I loved her so much and I still can’t believe that she’s gone. My grandfather, in a strange form of tribute, has slowly begun converting his orange house into one with a deep color of purple. Some things remain just as they were, to remind us of how she enjoyed life and how she lived each day with her head in the air and her thoughts composed. Her basket of oranges remains filled as always, and the Denver Broncos flag she got from my brother for Christmas still hangs over their bed, flanked by childhood pictures of her 5 grandchildren. At my house, we have found other ways of remembering her, one of them being to rid our diets of eggplants, purple grapes, and beets. This coming weekend for Halloween, my brother and I have one more tribute planned. We bought a big bucket of purple paint from Sherwin Williams and we’re going to paint ourselves purple and walk around with our heads held up high saying to anyone who asks,
“We may not be winning any beauty pageant, but we are still the finest looking ladies and gentlemen with purple skin in the whole United States of America.”
