Weather and Paint

November sky: indecisive. Clouds drift and gather, descend into moist haze, dissipate. The light slants, Fall-like, and then out of the blue, a bird sings, a wave of heat draws out beads of perspiration under my long-sleeved shirt. It is a constant old-clothes race, switching from sweats and sweatshirt to shorts and t-shirt. I am waiting, desperately, for resolution. Will it be rain? Will it be Fall? Will we dispense with all that and elect for eternal summer instead? Waiting. Indecision. Limbo. Much like my life.

These days lack of resolution has me painting my walls. The pure white of the corridor had grown tired and dirty looking, and so I invested in three buckets of 'candelight white' and am busy rolling it on -- walls, ceilings, my face and hair. Renewal through paint. But the metaphor, even as I'm craning my neck to get that corner of the ceiling I missed on the first round, has got me thinking. Is it renewal, in the sense of purification or cleansing, or do we simply bury the old unsightly stuff, never really working it out or throwing it out? Does the old baggage, the dirt and smudges, always lurk there just beneath the surface?

I like my pristine cream-colored walls now; I like this new surface. How tempting it can be to slather on a fresh new layer, a new look. Switch out a tired old job, relationship, or hairstyle for a shiny new one. Remake ourselves. But are we renewing or escaping? Are we changing our exteriors to reflect shifts in our interiors, or merely because we have grown too uncomfortably close with our interiors? And how to know the difference?