When the going gets tough, where do you go girls? It depends on one’s definition of tough I suppose.  For most of us, the days surrounding the shootings at Virginia Tech, can fairly be rated as high on the toughness scale, by any measure. Though Virginia in the spring is usually a time of subtle beauty, I clearly remember the days post shootings as seeming very, very dark.  We’d returned the day before from a spring break week spent in Sedona, Arizona, a part of the country long associated with luring artists for it’s lush and magical natural beauty.  We enjoyed the week in a secluded mountain top former fishing lodge, built in the 1920’s.  In the evenings, we watched the sun go down over the miles of red rocks surrounding our spot in what felt like a kind of rugged paradise.  We colored eggs on Easter, and our girls had fun ‘hiding’ them in the varied cactus around the property.  We played scrabble outside in the afternoons, and drove into town when the spirits moved us.  All in all, it was a wonderful trip, largely for it’s off scale rapture.  I remember walking through the house, looking out all of the windows, marveling to my husband about all the majesty, that purple mountain majesty really, especially at sunset, through every single window. 

Something about taking in that scope of magnificent-ness, made me sense that the world felt fragile.  I remember standing in front of a particular view, trying to absorb the vastness of it, and thinking, and feeling, that somehow, things seemed off balance.  I don’t know how to explain it, but I had the distinct sense that things felt very fragile in the face of all this massiveness.  On a day trip to the Grand Canyon, I remember feeling the same.  Not a foreboding, but that nagging sense of fragileness kept hovering—on the empty stretches of highway, with the tumbleweeds rolling, there it was.  At the massive Grand Canyon, the same.

We returned home on Sunday, and on that next day, Monday, there it was—incident at Tech.  I can’t say whether this was the ying, to the yang I was feeling out west, but that devastation sure did the leveling.  Brutally knocking things back to kilter. The rich saturated colors of the canyons, the skies, and then the bright yellow daffodils, in April bloom on our return, seemed to fade suddenly, screechingly, into black.  Just heavy, dark, and weighted gloom.

Call me shallow, but for some reason, I needed color, and I needed it fast.  I felt a powerful urge to be quite literally ensconced in riotous color, as though force feeding life back into my very dashed spirit.  Here’s the crazy part.  I racked my brain for the strongest, most colorful fashion armor I could think of, and it struck me, and so off I went.  Where?  Straight to the Pink Palm on River Road, home of the Lily Pulitzer collection, pretty much as straight up colorful as it gets, of course.  I had never been, but there I was, dressing like I was headed for the Country Club, after a morning round of golf.  Even my own daughters hardly recognized me, and it took me a while to recognize myself.  I felt like a kind of imposter in this ‘safe new world.’

Don’t get me wrong.  I love color, it’s just prior to then, I didn’t wear a ton of it.  Much of my wardrobe consisted of darker, more solid pieces.  But after Cho?  After that darkness?  I wanted light.  I wanted bright.  And girls, Lily’s got it.  Color and brightness galore.