This last week I threw caution to the wind and tried to squeeze in one more Indian Summer project before Old Man Winter got cranky. Ignoring all the safety labels that suggested I do otherwise, I decided to paint the beat-up seventy-year-old concrete on our back porch. The pamphlets on staining concrete suggested application temperatures above fifty degrees and emphasized avoiding any foot traffic for two weeks. I disregarded all that information and applied the paint when it was thirty-seven and then walked on it the next day. I was convinced that any damage I made would look better than the decrepit concrete pad which, by the way, had an enormous glaring stain in the middle of it. Over the years I’ve had plenty of time to study that stain, and I have concluded that its mysterious shape bore an eerie resemblance to the chalky-white victim outlines you see in detective movies.
I’m not saying the shape had to be the result of a murder, of course. It could be that the outlined person/shape could have resulted from a person falling off our roof, except that the shape looked more like it had shifted forward, not straight down, leaving me to conclude that the victim was hit from behind. Secondly, the human shaped stain had to be made from something that could withstand all types of weather and could not be washed away easily, like grease. Using my deductive reasoning, I concluded it was probably the grease from spilt burgoo soup, a local favorite of southern Indiana, and the murder weapon, of course, would be the crock pot that was holding it.
At first, I thought the grease stain might come from a crock pot of chili, but now I don’t believe that is the case. People at a Fall party in Indiana normally devour chili as if it is their last meal, so there wouldn’t have been any of that left as the murderer left our back door, crock pot in hand. Burgoo, while popular around here, does not have quite the same appeal, and there would have been some left over that would have emptied itself over the concrete after the victim was knocked on the head – a horrible thought – but necessary if we are to get to the bottom of this back porch mystery.
After years of looking at the stain, I could not entertain the idea of looking at that human-like shape much longer, crying over spilt burgoo as it were, and so I began focusing on the chore of picking a paint sample from the thousands of choices available at the local paint store. Turns out, the number of color samples there numbered in the hundreds, giving me full reign to use the word plethora, as in there were a plethora of color samples available for me to choose, and not when describing the remains of an enormously beaked flightless dinosaur, unearthed in the Ngorongoro Crater in 1922.
As Halloween was approaching, I narrowed my color samples down to a batch of twenty-seven different oranges, resulting in a lot of squinting that required me to use a small bottle of moisturizing eye drops. At that point I considered just gluing all my samples down in a repeating patten and not paint anything at all. Who cares if my porch looked like a checkered Amish quilt from Vermont? As long as the burgoo stain was covered and there’s no evidence of murder, I asked myself, does it really matter?
Turns out, it did matter, quite a bit actually, because everyone of the color samples I picked had a name suggestive of a unseemly murder, names that were evocative of all things slightly sinister. I had read the entire collection of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, and knew, of course, that suspicion by its very nature is never slight, and that all my paint samples were absolutely, very, very, slightly suspicious. For example, one choice for our porch was a color named Delicious Fog, a dark gray with a hint of orange if you looked at it when there is a full moon. I thought immediately of a scene from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of Baskervilles, when a savage murderous beast is heard howling from the bogs of the Grimpen Mire, and decided then that using Delicious Fog might suggest that our porch was part of some cover-up and that through infrared technology one might see a stain had been scrubbed for hours with a hard bristled brush to erase evidence of a murder by crock pot filled with leftover burgoo.
As I looked through other favorite samples, I noticed that all of them had, as I said before, a suspicious character. For organizational purposes, I divided them into three categories, first, second-, and third-degree orange samples, the least offensive being the third-degree kind. Burnt Cavern and Rustling in the Night immediately came to the forefront as options, with Terra O’Cotta floating in as a close second. Terry Who? A quick google search led to one Terry O’Cotton, close enough I thought, a now deceased Irish gang member whose body was found at the bottom of a ceramic brick kiln. On that tragic and gory note, I eliminated the color of Terra O’Cotta altogether. My wife has some stellar Irish heritage running through her veins, and invading our cozy back porch with a color that puts her ancestry in a bad light, even if a terra cotta orange, might create some marital discord, particularly if we all took a ceramics class together. I moved on to the next level, a striking, no pun intended, series of second-degree orange samples.
Here, the names began to get downright dark, names like Knives Out Tan, Thrown Headlong Off A Rusty Bridge, and the worst, Deader’n Doornail Bronze. All of these, mind you had the orange tint or shade I was seeking, but left me feeling that, instead of covering up the shape of a creepy chalked outline, I would be covering up evidence for, and thus somehow complicit in, some kind of wrongdoing. It seemed unlikely that I would be implicated in a crime just by making a poor color choice for a back porch, but stranger things have happened in the grisly business of second-degree orange choices. I had a family, and a legacy to consider, which seemed to me, as I studied the names on the swatches, superseded any selfish wishes I had for beautifying my back porch.
At this point in the process, I began to get very anxious. I was running out of orange possibilities. Out of literally hundreds of possible choices, I was now left with only a few selections, and unfortunately, they were all first-degree samples, the most gut-clenching and nefarious of all. These samples give even the most experienced detective night sweats and have names whose records are stamped with the word UNSOLVED and left sealed in the archives of police records. No one looks at those records once they are filed away, much less consider them as a color choice for a back porch. They are case mysteries, with inconspicuous suspects and missing murder weapons. Occasionally, there is a breakthrough, as in the case of a detective who was only days from retirement and gave one of the unsolved files a last look. He deduced the fatal weapon used was an icicle, which quickly melted, leaving nothing but an irrelevant puddle of water. That color sample’s name? Icicle Orange. And that is a sample you put away and don’t ever mention again.
This is a very tender subject of course and we are a tender, sensitive group at our house. Something as simple as a color choice, while seemingly harmless to most families, is like a slow leaky faucet around ours. We have sensitive minds around here that drip slowly, and those drips begin to sound louder and louder as they echo off the metal of our stainless-steel brain late at night. Our thoughts turn our psyche into a dark rusty orange around our house and by Wednesday we realize that we haven’t talked to each other since last Saturday, that we have been bothered by some torturous noise in the background, or possibly what is beneath that layer of Icicle Orange we used on our porch.
I realized that, and found myself back at the paint store, this time inspecting much more tranquil selections, gray swatches with names like Open-Minded Synchronicity or Light Drizzle and my personal favorite, Warm Flannel Pajamas. Those names did not have quite the punch that the orange samples had, but then punch wasn’t a word that we were using anymore, especially not ever on our back porch.