Welcome . . .
Here in the blogsphere we do a lot of listing, like the popular Hundred Things. We’re fond of our Friday Five or Tuesday This or That entries and similar writing exercises that not only stave off the wolf of writer’s block but makes us do a bit of inner probing. So, in a bid to do something a little different, I’ve researched the list of classic colors from the 64-count Crayola box and offer for your consideration my Eclectic Crayons, a list of what I see, feel, remember or would color with each one if given the chance and unlimited talent and imagination. Eight colors defeated me and are left blank. I guess they'd be the ones in my box that never lose their points. If you are struck with an inspiration for these colors, drop me an email at herself@ranakwilliamson.com and I'll let you be the one to use that Crayola first.

Note: These are the 48 colors available from 1949 to 1957 and the 16 colors added in 1958 (which begin at aquamarine) that brought the count to 64. For a Crayola color chronology, click here. These would have been the colors available in my childhood. I have not included the new colors that will be found in any 64 count box currently for sale, like Asparagus, Purple Mountain Majesty, or Macaroni and Cheese.

Color Methodology: Many of these swatches were taken from the Crayola site as screen captures, others were created in Photo Shop by literally comparing Crayolas from a 64 count box to the Pantone charts. I came as close as possible to the real thing on my own screen in order to do the writing. As you know, matching colors on the web is a devilish business so hues will vary from computer to computer. The best way to have the Crayola color experience is simply to treat yourself to a box. The smell is still as wonderful as it was in grade school. If I had no reference to create a swatch a "NA" (not available) box will appear beside the entry.

	apricot - When the breakfast menu features pancakes R. reaches for a tall, thin bottle of apricot syrup. I watch the sticky stream as it flows down toward the stack, makes contact, and spreads over the edges and onto the plate and think about what a mess washing up will be.
	bittersweet – The color chart does nothing to define this shade of crayon for me. The name works alone and makes this the Crayola of memory, the one we’d use to shade that recollection of the first love lost, the favorite toy broken, or the companion with us no longer.
	black – In the years since my coloring days came to an end friends have reacted with horror when I confessed my favorite crayon from the pack was black. “You were a depressed child,” they’ve opined sagely, but in truth I liked the shine when you’d color over and over the same spot, laying the layers thick until the light glinted off the wax and shone like a newly polished pair of shoes.
	blue – Blue tops Crayola’s list of America’s fifty favorite colors and while it is useful for doing the sky, rivers and oceans, it is also the color of fidelity. Too often associated with sadness or depression, I’d use it to tint that which is true and everlasting. Even as a child I colored blue hearts on Valentine's day and vainly tried to explain my reasoning to scolding teachers who brandished their red crayons and "supposed to be's."
	blue green – My late father thought all shades of blue matched and, if left to his own devices, would happily come out of the bedroom wearing a navy suit with powder blue socks. Here we've moved from the shade of fidelity to that of a glowing blue snow cone on a hot summer afternoon.
	blue violet - And with only a drop of violet to change the equation, we've gone from chilly crushed ice to the tint of the little old woman with blue hair emerging from the beauty parlor. Aqua Net holds her freshly coiffed and back-combed locks in place for their unconvincing but glowing imitation of gray and no one dares to tell her the truth about how she looks.
	brick red - Just a few miles from the Little Town the soil turns to red clay. In the heat of summer and the long days of drought the clay bakes to this shade so that every pickup that comes in from the country no matter it's own paint job drives along under a thick layer of red brick dust.
	brown - Brown may labor under the reputation of drabness but without this crayola we could not color beagle's coats or capture that perfectly browned morning toast. We need our browns to ground the other colors and remind us that sometimes that which is strong and ordinary is more vivid than that which is flashy and rare.
	burnt sienna - We need this redder, darker brown for the beloved and battered penny loafers we hide in the closet rather than throw out or the bowl of brownie batter waiting to be poured in the pan. It's the hue for the walls of the make-believe log cabin we build in the woods and dream about during bad days and for the cat tails that grow on the banks of the pond.
	carnation pink - Turning this crayola around under the light I see white flowers dipped in dye, cotton candy at the county fair, and little girls toenails painted for the first time with the polish they picked out themselves.
	cornflower - Once a month during my youth the Little Town hosted a flea market on the courthouse lawn. I'd wander around under the pecan trees poking through the junk, always fascinated by the old bottles offered for sale. Many were earlier versions of products still being sold on store shelves including Milk of Magnesia. I can still see the world turn blue through one of those bottles as I'd hold it up to the light and wonder why anything so, er, functional would come in a bottle that pretty,
	peach – Here we have the crayon formerly known as “flesh” until civil rights advocates called for its renaming in 1962. It never worked for me to use this hue on the faces of my pilgrims and dead presidents back in grade school. They came out pasty, like old women who trowel on pancake makeup until they look like animated plaster casts of themselves. Certainly this crayon is not the color of a peach skin where warm yellow bleeds into glowing orange nor does it approach the patina of the sticky golden juice that runs down your chin with the first bite. There’s only one thing you can do with this Crayola, color Band Aids on your pilgrims and dead presidents.
	gold - Like silver, this crayon disappointed me. I wanted it to shine like King Tut's glorious mask and instead it hit the paper with the dull, heavy thud of unpolished brass.
	gray - Forever and always gray will make me think of warm fur and purring cats, two in particular, my companions, friends, and employers.
	green - While we could all name dozens and dozens of green things, from St. Patrick's day construction paper shamrocks to astro turf, I especially like the big green umbrellas covering tables in outdoor cafes. Something about that dense canvas connotes welcome shade and hours passed over a latte solving the problems of the world with existential insight.
	green blue - In West Texas we don’t have crystalline rivers. Ours are stained a greenish blue by minerals, sediment, plant life, and the tangle of logs and limbs fouling the bottom to frighten swimmers with a slithering caress or to snag the hooks of unsuspecting fishermen. This is the crayon of water lapping the bank under spreading pecan limbs on a hot summer day.
	green yellow - In the spring my father waged war with fat, green yellow caterpillars that fed with ruthless efficiency on the emerging leaves of his precious pecan trees, Mother's pot plants, the tomato vines and anything else that attracted the rhythmic attention of their jaws. Neon in their defiance, three more seemed to appear for every one he dispatched.
	lemon yellow – Lemon yellow, the color of cold sherbet on a hot summer day, served in fragile polite china in Great Aunt Emma’s parlor. More refined than ice cream, chillier in its consistency, pale in its hue, frozen sunlight in a bowl.
	magenta - During my years grading papers as a graduate assistant and then an instructor I spilled gallons of ink just this shade from Uniball pens. I filled the margins of bluebooks with bleeding comments, corrections, and suggestions. My favorite? The student wrote, "Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. This upset him and the nation very much." I wrote, "True. FDR never got over it."
	mahogany - When I was in high school my parents hired a man to refinish the enormous upright piano on which I'd learned to play. Stripping away the pebbled black paint laid on thick in the factory in the Thirties or Forties, he found mahogany underneath. When the instrument came home it sat by a window so that when I sat and played in the late afternoon the slanting rays of the setting sun turned the wood this shade of dark red fire.
	maize - I'm not sure any crayon can do justice to corn or maize on the cob. Grain has saved civilizations, caused wars, served as the underpinning of economies, and staved off the hunger in starving bellies. Some societies have made it a god, incorporating the vital ears into their mythology and cosmology. That's asking a lot from one crayon.
	maroon - If you live in Texas maroon can mean only one thing, the Texas Aggies, but as it happens there's another school with the same colors, one the legislature just voted to rename, an act of which I disapproved vehemently. I won't give the new name the dignity of typing it here, but I attended Southwest Texas State University, my maroon and gold alma mater.
	melon - My father loved to eat cantaloupe in the summer time, holding dripping slices over the sink. He'd come in from his business, a steam laundry, and head straight for the refrigerator, craving the cooling effect of the cold orange slices.
	olive green - My first year in graduate school I carried a book bag of olive green canvas with leather and brass closures acquired from Banana Republic. Whenever I slung the wide strap over my shoulder I could pretend to be trudging through darkest Africa with Stanley, not slugging to the library for another safari with the card catalog.
	orange - Road construction never seems to end in our city. What goes in one year gets plowed up the next and always, always there are the cones, the endless orange cones. I've come to think of them as sprouting up from the pavement on their own as if their spores lie dormant in the asphalt until the sound of a jackhammer springs them to life.
	orange red - I confess I have a problem distinguishing reds and oranges. When my apartment burned R. was adamant that my "orange" couch could not be saved. I protested that my couch was brown and after a few tests we discovered I really can't properly identify gradients of these two colors. So, I can only say that I feel safe that sunsets contain orange reds.
	orange yellow - And, building on the confession of mild color blindness given above, I can say with some confidence sunsets also contain orange yellows. But let's face it, when the sun is going down against the clouds and impossible pinks, reds, oranges, and yellows are shooting up from the horizon, no one should be wasting those precious moments arguing about color.
	orchid
	periwinkle - On my first trip to England I used a large chunk of my scrimped and saved funds to buy a Wedgewood vase and brooch for my Mother. She never understood why it hurt me that she displays them with cheap plastic knock offs of the pattern from Avon.
	pine green - Remember the long, flat roof pieces in the Lincoln Logs building set? That's the green of all the roofs of all the cabins built by all the children in America for all those years when Lincoln logs were cool and no batteries were required.
	midnight blue - My room back in the old home place was intended to belong to my sister but she only used it a year before going to college so by the time I started school, I was allowed to move in. Preparatory to that transition Mother had the walls painted sea foam green and put down midnight blue, deep shag carpet -- that is still there to this day because it's "too good to change."
	red – In my Hundred Things list I commented that I had to learn to wear red, to step out of my blues and browns and chose a hue that says, “Notice me.” Color courage, vibrancy and flair with this Crayola and don’t worry about staying inside the lines.
	red orange
	red violet
	salmon - This aptly named crayon just captures the color of the fish prized by so many gourmands. Here's the hitch for me. R.'s father loved salmon but his wife was too cheap to fix it. When they moved here to spend their last two years closer to R., she prepared salmon for her father on every special occasion. If I never have to eat another bite of the stuff it will be too soon.
	sea green – They call this crayon "sea" green but I see it on the underside of building storm clouds, that place down low where thunder and lightning roils together just before the deluge. That's the place my father said gave birth to hail, a kind of greenish, glowing cauldron in the sky.
	silver – Let’s face it, this crayon is just another of the myriad shades of gray. It will never look like a silver coffee service newly polished and bright as a mirror. At best this is the underside of aluminum foil or the dullness of a corrugated tin roof, dingy metal, lackluster, serviceable but dreary.
	spring green – I grew up in a land where drought strikes with regularity. Every spring my Mother began pouring water on her precious lawn where the grass emerged in defiant green. I see this vibrant shade sometimes in my memories when I think of the sunlight falling through the trees in the our backyard and spot lighting that grass she tended so generously against the heat and drought that threatened to fade its color back to parchment.
	tan – Do you know what I mean when I say a hound dog’s eyebrows? It’s that little daub of tan above a coonhound’s eyes that give them such expressive faces and make them the world’s premier beggars.
	thistle - I don't remember this crayon, nor could I find a color sample, but I assume it's a purple, the shade of the tall spikey thistles that grow in Texas bar ditches in the summer. R. loves them (while everyone else considers the plant a weed) and more than once I've pulled the car over and cut the tallest for her to take home and dry.
	turquoise blue - Every Labor Day my family spent the long weekend in Ruidosa, New Mexico. Saturday morning Mother and I would go shopping and I'd stand longingly before cabinets of Indian jewelry set with limpid turquoise coveting the heaviest silver pieces with the biggest stones. To this day I've never owned one of those rings, but it's on my list.
	violet (purple) - How can anyone who has every gone through grade school and high school see this shade as anything but mimeograph ink? Yes, I always volunteered to hand out the papers freshly arrived from the office, still damp off the machine, and wonderful to sniff.
	violet blue
	violet red
	white - Ah, the dysfunctional crayon! The one that only worked correctly on black construction paper but was useless on white drawing sheets or Big Chief tablets. No matter how hard I tried, Santa's beard never looked right and snowflakes were just floating anemic daubs.
	yellow - There were few things my father ever forced me to do but learning to eat eggs was one of them. He insisted I put aside my squeamishness at the sight of the blazing yellow yolks and just chew, damn it. In his opinions a plate of eggs qualified as a life pleasure not to be missed -- scrambled or fried, he didn't care, and he was right. (I confess Papa, I'll eat them poached too.)
	yellow green - In adulthood I've learned that many of my toys are now regarded as lethal or toxic hazards. One of my favorites was a hollow plastic ball filled with a no doubt poisonous soup that looked like this until you subjected it to a good dose of light. (I used to set it on top of a lamp with a hurricane glass fixture, an act which I now realize probably courted fire at the very least and perhaps explosion.) After five minutes you could flip the light off and that ball would put out enough fluorescence to let you read a page clearly in a pitch black room.
	yellow orange
	aquamarine - I can't swim so this cold, watery blue used to coat the bottom of a swimming pools makes me vaguely uneasy. It undulates down there below making me dizzy and afraid as I back away from the water's edge.
	blue gray - Blue gray clouds hang over a winter morning when the cold weighs the air so it can't move and going out seems an insane necessity with a welcoming blaze right there in the fireplace.
	burnt orange - In Texas if maroon means the Texas Aggies, burnt orange connotes the University of Texas longhorns. Locked in an epic and historic rivalry these two colors annually fill football stadiums and illuminate life and death grid iron struggles.
	cadet blue - When Mother "did the books" complete silence reigned in the house. She sat at the kitchen table, pulling the lamp close to light her file drawer of "tickets." Her adding machine beat out a staccato rhythm and expelled trailing tendrils of paper while she checked and re-checked her figures, which she entered meticulously with a constantly re-sharpened pencil in a ledger whose cover was just this powdery blue.
	copper - Until my third grade year my father kept a private plane whose call letters were 7640-Papa. That made sense to me since it was my Papa's plane. The wings, nose, and tail of the little bird carried these copper accents, a color I will always associate with that plane and the joyful hours I spent in the clouds with my Dad.
	forest green
	golden rod - My school colors were black and gold but all the construction paper, poster board, and crepe paper with which we festooned the halls and gym on game day came in packages labeled "golden rod." So this is the crayola of high school Fridays.
	Indian red (chestnut) - The company renamed this crayon in 1999 after teachers feared the name "Indian red" led children to see the shade as the face of Native Americans. It actually referred to a reddish-brown pigment found near India and used in fine oil paints. I think I'd rather they had taught the children something about the paint. Renaming isn't a substitute for understanding.
	lavender - On Washington's Olympic Peninsula in a little town called Sequim, R. and I visited a lavender farm. One shade of purple could never cover what we saw and breathed that day. I sat in a swing on the front porch of the tiny house and watched as R. walked through rows of blooming lavender, picking a bouquet to be made into a sachet. Just the word "lavender" takes me back to that quiet place on a cool, sunny vacation morning when the air hung heavy with the colors of an herb.
	mulberry
	navy blue - This is not the shade I think of when someone says "navy blue," but it matches the crayon itself and makes me think of links, that magic hypertext that allows us to surf endlessly. I first connected to the Internet in 1991 and proceeded to click unceasingly for the next 12 hours, instantly hooked by the online world. Those blue underlined words that transformed the cursor into a beckoning hand promised vistas of information -- irrelevant, useless, incorrect, slanted, or ridiculous information perhaps, but beguiling all the same.
	plum - Mad Dog 20/20. Need I say more?
	raw sienna - In high school the mark of having come of age was acquiring a hand-tooled leather, zip binder from M.L. Leddy & Sons in San Angelo. Across the swirled front they stamped your name in ornate letters. Mine said, "Rana Kay." Where the tooling dips down or makes a turn, the pale leather turned this darker shade highlighting the depth of the impression. Generations of high school kids in West Texas carried those notebooks and something tells me they still do.
	raw umber - Okay, I confess, I had to Google for, "What color is umber?" This page helped a lot and made me think of single malt whisky, the Scotch of the gods. Talisker, Oban, Glenmorangie. For some reason waiters never get it when a woman orders whisky. "What would you like with your Scotch, ma'am?" they ask with unctuous attention. "Scotch," I answer, enjoying their discomfiture.
	sepia – The crayon that seemed to shade all the old photographs, the box of tin types and daguerreotypes I inherited as images of unidentified ancestors. We see the past through the watered lens of sepia and recognize its age by the color if not by substance and detail.
	sky blue - We knew in grade school he'd be an artist by the way he chose all the blue crayons, not just the one named "sky" and blended them into his pictures until you could see the air move. We didn't know he'd grow up in a world with something called AIDS or that he'd die so soon with so many drawings left undone.