memoir writers homework

I don't know what happened to the list of topics from my memoir group in Toronto over the last few weeks,but I see that there is now a full list of them up to and including yesterdays meeting.It must be time to complete another homework assignment.I very much miss writing with my colleagues and friends in Toronto,as our sessions were always spirited,fun and revealing in ways I never expected them to be.Today's assignment is on the topic of "colours"and was one of May 28th's topics.I'll try to complete an assignment from yesterdays list a little later this week.

Once I took a photography class in the early1980's,and one of the students asked the instructor a question about black and white film.The instructor evidently though the question did not warrant a lot of comment,as he replied"I don't even know why anyone bothers with black and white.To me its just a waste of time since we see in color".Well,at least most of us do,except the ultra conservatives perhaps,but that's another diatribe.

However,I quite agree with that instructor.Colour is a thing we are just immersed in from the day we are born.My grandmother used to call African people "coloured"and I always thought the term strange,so I asked her what she meant by it and she said"you know exactly who I'm talking about"Colour used as a euphemism.She got really annoyed when I told her I was a coloured person too.I just wasn't brown.Well,I still think I'm right and I don't so much object to this archaic term so long as I'm included in it.

Red is likely my least favorite colour.Our house was always red and white.And our summer cottage,as well as that little two by four and plywood monument to organic chemistry that's parked beside it.All red and white.Just seems a bit lacking in imagination,since we seemed to paint these buildings every couple of years.Maybe,I'd have thought,we could paint at least one of them yellow or purple or some colour besides red.But we never did.

In an art gallery in Calgary,not so many years ago I saw a beautiful painting of a trout migrating upstream through a river,over a bed of gravel,and it reminded me of one of my favorite places,a small stream in the hills of Albert County New Brunswick.And it was not so much the colours themselves that supplied the reminder as it was the thought that those colours were not likely rendered by the artist in exactly the same way as they appeared.Neither does my favorite place in my minds eye.The place is green,of course,leaf green and frog green.It's banks are shades of earth,brown and yellow and black mud.Its stones many coloured.Moss flowing in strands of green.The water different at different times and seasons,but when you scoop up a handful,no color at all,completely clear.Lately I"ve began to wonder if it might not be a good place to have someone drop a few white ashes into the stream bed so that I might add my own colour to God's exquisite rendering of earth and water.What I imagine it to be is not truly the colour it is.I think I see the place as more of an impressionist vision than what it really is.That comes from being away so long.