This past Christmas, my wife gave me a unique gift: enrollment in a creative writing course at Otterbein University. English 1160: Writing Across the Genres met for the first time last Wednesday in Otterbein’s Towers Hall. I received my syllabus, listened as Professor Terry Hermsen laid out his expectations, and joined my classmates in some creative-writing exercises. Then came the homework — four separate assignments. One involved completing an exercise from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Here’s the one I selected:

Choose a color — for instance. pink — and take a fifteen-minute walk. On your walk, notice wherever there is pink. Come back to your notebook and write for fifteen minutes.

I chose gray rather than pink. Then I took my walk and wrote the essay that follows.

IN SEARCH OF GRAY

By Clay Cormany

The color gray does not have the best reputation in American society. It is associated with the drab clothing of Pilgrims, Puritans, and other colonial-era Americans. Worse, it was the color of uniforms worn by Confederate soldiers, who (knowingly or unknowingly) were fighting to preserve slavery. Of course, gray does have its admirers. Ohio State fans, for example, cherish gray as one of the Buckeyes’ two team colors.

My search for gray began in front of my house, which is in a cul-de-sac off of State Route 161 in Worthington. It took me down 161, through Pingree Park, around Granville Square, and then back home — a distance of about one-half mile that was covered in just under 15 minutes.

I saw eight houses that are mostly or partly gray. That included houses that have gray garages, gray shutters, and/or gray roofs. Many homes have mailboxes painted gray or attached to gray-colored posts. Several backyards featured gray fences, gray patio furniture, and gray lawn ornaments, such as boulders, which may have been plastic. One home had a gray hot tub; another had a gray tarp pulled over a car.

Speaking of cars, I saw quite a few gray ones parked on streets. Those included a Honda Accord, an Acura MDX, and a Toyota Sequoia. Other like-colored cars zoomed past me but moved too quickly to be identified by make or model.

On the return trip to my house, I noticed some gray objects I missed when passing them the first time. I saw that although the street signs in my neighborhood are green, all are held aloft by metallic-gray poles. There are also tree trunks that are speckled gray or that have gray mixed in with other colors, usually brown or green. Somehow, I almost forgot about the sky, which on this afternoon held a near-solid mass of gray clouds from one horizon to the other.

Before going back into my house, I searched my own backyard for those annoying gray creatures that help themselves to food my wife and I put out for birds. I didn’t see any squirrels, but evidence of their presence was there in the form of tiny claw marks on the gray wooden pole supporting our bird feeder.