When first we came to our happy home, many asked, “What is the best thing about your new house?” Without exception, I said, “The kitchen!” but without exception, when I showed people around the new house, I felt compelled to add, on entering that palatial workspace, “I hate the green. I wanna paint it.” The calm, almost Italianate tile and borders in beige, cream, and white, and the linoleum with the faint tracing of fallen leaves, was accented with walls of bright hospital mint green, the kind of color you’d expect daubed onto a dentist’s rotary polisher, not smoothed on kitchen walls. “Artificially cheerful,” lissell called it.

So, as some of you may have the dubious honour of knowing, I painted my kitchen this past weekend. I removed every power tool and oddment from the kitchen counters, scoured the walls of grease with industrial cleaning solution, contorted my body into strange corners of cabinetry and precision-laid a half-mile of masking tape. Finally, I carefully painted the walls, squinting to find the million places where the high texture had left traces of mint green lurking under the dusty sky blue. I spent a little under 20 hours, perhaps, on this task, from the first scrape of sloppy mint green with the glass cutter to the final remnant of masking tape peeled painstakingly off the trim. I joked with Matthew, as I viewed the many rectangles and odd shapes into which a kitchen wall resolves itself, that two weeks from now I would wake up screaming because I would dream a patch of it was still mint green.

On Monday, lissell and wonko came over to play Exalted, and were forced to view and praise the newly blue room. Swashbuckling fun was had, the guests went home, and I paused with my hand on the kitchen light switch, revelling in the first day of my kitchen, clean, restored to usefulness, and fully blue. I looked across to the microwave, tucked in a custom-built shelf, and saw behind it the unmistakable radioactive cheeriness of Unpainted Mint Green.