“…The Color Purple (this color that is always a surprise but is everywhere in nature)…” – Alice Walker

I’ve been reading Southern women – I turned the final page of Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter last night, and tore through Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood before that.  As I read those, I waited impatiently for either Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Café or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple to become available at our public library.  And wouldn’t you know it, they both became available yesterday.  What a quandary.  Which should I read first?!  After careful deliberation, which included a plea for guidance on my Facebook page and an appetite for getting back to my roots, I chose Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.  Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where I planted my first carrot seeds, shucked my first corn, and caught my first yellow belly in the Crooked Creek that ran through Grandaddy and Nannie’s farm.  I began reading last night, and I’m already a goner.

I loved Alice Walker’s suggestion that the color purple is always a surprise but is everywhere in nature, so I took my camera out for this week’s photo challenge, Color, to see if it was true.  Given that the world is still mostly brown here in Blacksburg – the weeping willows are the only trees leafing out yet, and there are only a few blooms here and there – I was surprised by how much purple there actually was.  Can’t wait to see how the color purple plays into the novel.