I believe in the color orange

I believe in the color orange. Among all other colors in the spectrum, orange has had a bad reputation. Traffic jams, road rage and hazardous conditions are riddled with orange traffic cones; and childhood nightmares are plagued with scary orange jack-o-lanterns. However orange for me has the opposite effect. When I pan across the color wheel, orange always catches my eye. It has a bold distinctive nature; it cannot hide. But it is not the same for everyone.

It is so ironic to me that my older brother is colorblind yet such a talented artist. He always says this is how he knows that God has a sense of humor. His room is always decorated so much more then mine with art awards. His little doodles on scratch paper of dragons or knights are better then my most extensive efforts to create the same. It can be humorous when he uses color because, on occasion, a dying war victim may have purple blood or a pretty purple pansy may be blue.

One day I asked him how he was able to make most of his paintings look ‘normal’. He responded, “I was told the grass is green, the sun is yellow, the sky is blue. You look on crayons and they tell you what color you’re using. I just kinda put two and two together”. I was puzzled. I don’t know how color blindness works, but thousands of thoughts started to run through my mind. He is drawing things the way they are because he was told what colors to use, and not necessarily what he saw. What I see as orange could be what he saw as my blue, even though he called it orange. Through my brothers eyes the sky could be my purple, the sun could be my green, the grass my yellow! Digging through a bag of Jelly-Bellys to find pink lemonade must be hell for him; he could be looking for green lemonade!

My curiosity to know what the world looks like through his eyes has made me look beyond simple colors. A woman giving birth out of wedlock may see a commandment of God broken while another sees Jesus Christ being born. For some situations, another’s vision is better then mine. All through my life I have been trying to valid date what I see. Colors are easy because the crayons say what they are and many can agree on blue being blue. But more obscure and indefinite concerns become hard when looking through more eyes then mine. I have learned to trust my eyes, but not rule out others views. There is no desire for me to be like someone else because orange for them is stressful hours in traffic; while my orange is an adrenaline pumping, eye-popping, color-wheel piercing reminder that I am different. My vision makes orange juice tasty, orange cars head-turning, and orange people out of the world. That’s why I love me. That is why I believe in orange.