Kitchen or the Egg

I did *not* care for the book “Secret Life Of Bees” but now that the movie is out, one of the unschooling lists I’m on is all gaga about it. Despite my own opinion (maybe I’ll reread it sometime), this quote from the book had me moved to tears.

~ Erica

FROM “SECRET LIFE OF BEES,” by Sue Monk Kidd:
(Lily, the protagonist, is talking to August, a woman whose house she is living in after running away from her abusive father. Lily is struggling toward being at a point where she can ask and hear the truth about her mother who died when she was 4, whatever the truth may be, instead of living with the stories she creates and the ones she tells. August lives with her
two sisters, June and May in a house painted a truly hideous shade of pink.)

Lily says to August:
“How come if your favorite color is blue, you painted your house so pink?”

She laughed.

“That was May’s doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, ‘Well, this is the tackiest
color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.’”

“All this time I just figured you liked pink,” I said.

She laughed again. “You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart - now *that* matters. The whole problem with people is -”

“They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t,” I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.

“I was gonna say, The problem is they *know* what matters, but they don’t *choose* it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

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