My skin is age-freckled white but I am a person of color.

Color is everything. Yellow is a happy color, yet I would be miserable living in a room with yellow walls. Yet again, a kitchen with old carpenter-built cabinets washed in a pale butter shade - lovely.

I think most people - men excluded - are color-oriented although not, perhaps, in touch with their inner hues. Men are suggestible. Tell a guy for the first 30 years of his life that pink is girly, and he'll run from it. Then, out of the blue, Ralph Lauren designs a line of pink dress shirts, pink golf shirts, pink-striped ties and pink socks, and men open their wallets wide.

I can trace every one of my color codes, beginning with yellow, to a not-very-happy childhood. My mother said yellow was a silly color, especially paired with purple on a spring hat. I must have agreed with her on some level because I don't buy yellow. Purple, on the other hand, is a favorite - either mauve or a dusty aubergine. I recall wearing a purple sweater to visit my elderly mother. She gave me the once-over, said nothing.

Common knowledge (my mother concurred) back in the 1960s was that blue and green didn't jive. Oh yes they did. I proved this by doing the kitchen in my first home in blue and green, from anemone-splashed wallpaper to curtains and floor.

Obviously, I had become a rebel with a cause.

Coordinating the colors was paramount. I picked a color scheme for each of my kids' ski outfits: suits, down-filled mitts, knitted hats, sweaters, turtlenecks. Comical, really, but this represented ... well, an achievement.

Then I put away childish things and grew into neutrals based on gray, rust and the blonde of unfinished antique pine.

Gray was always important because when I was 7, my father, who traveled for work most of my childhood and all of my teenhood, brought me back, from Chicago, a gray cotton dress with puffed sleeves and white pilgrim collar. How I adored that dress. He even took me - just me - out to dinner at a fancy New York restaurant, which is why I have a gray couch, gray rugs, gray table linens and a gray car.

Cars present a different issue. I only reject white and red: white because it looks like an ice cream truck and red because red is so .... red. I've heard that police are more likely to ticket brightly colored cars. None of my five gray cars have been noticeable, which is the way I like it, never mind that my grandson says someday he'll buy me a chrome yellow model that I can't lose in the supermarket lot.

After my daughter died in 1991 I couldn't stand color. For a decade I wore beige, brown, gray, navy blue, white and black. Then one day I saw an ice-pink cashmere pullover on a sale rack. It was soft to look at and soothing to touch. I bought it. I mourn forever, but perhaps this pink sweater was a milestone on the road to acceptance.

Still, although I don't drive it or sleep on it, my best color is blue. Blue rises above the silly colors, the ordinary primary colors. Blue is sky, faded denim, the Caribbean, cornflowers. Blue is my baby's eyes. Blue is Duke ... and, grudgingly, Carolina. Blue is The New Yorker magazine of colors, soaring over red-green-yellow People, Cosmopolitan and Newsweek. Blue is sapphires, Wedgwood china and cobalt glass.

Yet blue is said to be cool, distant, inspiring reflection rather than action.

I'll have to put on my pink sweater, sit down on my gray couch and think on that.

Contact Deborah Salomon at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.