We are at the point of being stymied by something we thought was easy. We need to choose paint. We have one very large, tall wall that once painted we will have to live with it since it will cost too much to repaint it. It is strange to think of a long-term decision that is as straightforward as paint.

I thought we were all set. We had paints we loved in our Idaho house that burned in the wildfire. We searched for years to find them and once found we loved them. We thought we could effectively repeat them here but no, they don’t work.

I went upstairs to the top level of the house and painted in multiple locations the colors we were certain we wanted. To me they look perfectly wrong. I studied the colors on the wall and the colors out the window and they just don’t match. I tried for a long time to figure out what was the underlying tone that was throwing things off.

In the high mountain desert where we lived before and where our paint colors were perfect, we had brown. In the spring it was green but with a brown undertone. In the winter it was white but with a brown undertone. Here it is green, and it is gray. I am now stuck trying to figure out how to be gray without feeding the overcast Pacific Northwest days we get creeping over into Montana.

I am stuck. I cannot sort the colors out. One would think that it would be relatively easy but the light changes across the large room that is two stories and has ceiling over part and part is in a gallery area. The room is very open but also inviting. The wrong color could feed the openness and close off the inviting side.

Selecting color is more difficult because it is a long-term decision and we have not been used to those lately. Our life has been lived in bits and pieces trying to get to “the house” which is our home. It was an abstract concept. It is. I did not think of it in the long-term, only getting one. The colors are very specific. We have to live with them for a good long while.

I am certain it does not matter as much as I am trying to make it matter but it feels like a critical decision. I feel adrift because I cannot pick up my things and put them with color and understand. Everything is burned up in the wildfire or it is similar to what we had but a poor substitution and even those are not assessable to us since they are packed in the warehouse waiting to be moved into the house.

It struck me tonight that I could cut this loose and not worry so much since we are painting the “little rooms” like the bedrooms and baths. We wanted to put color there and we have time to think about it. That does not solve the problem of the expensive walls. We have three and they are about $1000 each to paint. A wrong decision is a wrong decision.

The expensive walls rise way up,. They take scaffolding to paint. They are effectively big canvases with only paint and in some cases windows. The paint color matters.

I am exhausted from another long day. I have paint chips spread on our little tiny couch. It is dark in the Cruise Ship basement apartment since we don’t have windows here. Tomorrow we have to have a color.

We talk about “sleeping on it” as if we could make decisions by going to sleep. There are times when dreams come that make decisions clearer. However, I think that the most important part of sleeping on a decision is the sleep itself. Sleep is restorative and we awake with more to go on than we had at the end of a day.

Sleep is a short term relationship. For most adults in the U.S., it is a 5 to 9 hour relatinoship. For us, now, committing to paint is a long term relationship. I shall go have a short term relationship with sleep. Tomorrow I may know how to understand this home we have dreamed of for 20 months in a way that is literal and immediate.