E1

Bill Hunt

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Confession, they say, is good for the soul.

OK, here goes.

I sleep in a pink bedroom.

At least, I think it's pink. Maybe it's "Cotton Candy," or "Saltmarsh," or "Little Piggy" or some other euphemism for pink, but when I open my eyes in the morning, it's pink.

That's OK. I am secure enough in my masculinity to tell you this. I can tell you too, that Debbie's craft room is a light green; Kenny's room is blue and Shannon's old room - I hold out hope that some day she will reclaim it, but for now it belongs to our little husky/sheltie mix, Marley - is kind of an aqua or a coral blue. Or something like that.

However, I've been informed that, after at least a couple of years of being in the pink, if you will, things are about to change.

I know this because my bride and I spent last Saturday night removing the furniture from the master bedroom in order that she might paint.

I'm told it will be "taupe," which, if I understand correctly, is kind of a brown - a different shade than the brown in our hallway; not as light as the buttery yellow in our kitchen and living room perhaps, but somewhere in that range.

I can hardly wait.

I am, as you can probably guess, not invited to participate in the exercise of transforming our boudoir, other than the heavy lifting part - the lifting of the end tables and the box spring and mattress and such, to various other destinations within the home.

The three remaining bedrooms are in disarray. Night tables are across the hall. The bed frame and box spring are on their side in the craft room.

We are sleeping in the room Kenny vacated this summer, with Kurt Cobain and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

It's a very restless sleep.

Anyway, now that the physical labour has been completed, I have been cordially invited to stay the heck out of the way. Mow the lawn again. Walk the dog.

Debbie, you see, has seen my work with a paintbrush, and she is not impressed. Seems I splashed a little on the basement window when repainting the foundation one day about 15 years ago.

It took a decade or so before she would trust me with a paintbrush again, and I violated that trust by splashing a little bit on the ceiling when trying to do a touchup in Shannon's room four or five years ago.

That was enough to convince Debbie I'm no Picasso. She hasn't let me near a paintbrush since.

Which leads me to believe that we're in for a long summer.

Because, like you, dear reader, I know where this is going. It will take her a little longer, because she insists on working alone and, what with the room being pink and all, I'm betting it will take at least a couple of coats and another few days.

But I just know it's going to dry, she's going to love it, and when I am called upon to lug the furniture back across the hall, she will want to put the bed against this wall and the dresser against that one and we'll be getting rid of that old bookcase and we'll need a new TV. She'll love it, and she'll think we should have done this a while ago and we should keep going while we have the extra room to shuffle the furniture around, and the whole thing will spread like wildfire.

(It's just an expression ... Please don't tell me Wildfire is a very pretty colour on a paint chip at the Home Hardware or I will move out now.)

I think I can probably talk her out of doing the two remaining bedrooms. We redid Kenny's room just last year when he spent the summer in Calgary, and Shannon/Marley's room still looks OK to me. And if Debbie asks me, I will tell her so.

Perhaps I will be successful in channelling her energies downstairs and into the bathroom.

Yes. It's pink too.

Bill Hunt is a staff writer at The Daily Gleaner. He can be reached at huntsie@hotmail.com