The Color Purple

I have nothing against the color purple. I like purple flowers, like the lavender fields I photographed above in Santa Ynez last year. I like purple fish. I like purple anemones. I even own a few purple shirts. And I love it when the sky turns purple-as in these sunsets:

The top one is the Maldives, the bottom one is in Moalboal, Cebu in the Philippines.

But I’m not going to paint my house purple, or dye my hair purple or anything like that. I wonder why the color purple seems to inspire such reverence in some people? There was a lady in Lompoc,California when I was young, called the purple lady. She had a purple house, with purple flowers in the yard. She wore purple clothes, drove a purple car and had purple hair. I had even heard she dyed her poodle purple.

I'm not sure if she's still alive, but I found another purple lady up in Northern California--here's a picture of her:
There is a religion based on the color purple (I'm not kidding) called "Purpleism". Read more about it here: http://www.journaled.com/Purpleism/index.htm


But purple isn’t for everything. For instance, I don’t like purple food. A little purple on the outside, like eggplant, is fine but no more than that. Recently I bought some local sweet potatoes. I thought they looked a little darker than usual, but didn’t think too much about it. I planned on having mashed sweet potatoes with salmon for dinner. I scrubbed the potatoes and threw them in a pot of water. When I went to check them, I noticed the water had turned a funny color—almost the color of denim. When they were done and I peeled them, they were bright purple.

When I mashed them, they were even a brighter purple!

They smelled the same as regular sweet potatoes, but somehow, neither Ken nor I were very fond of them. They just didn’t taste as good as the orange ones.