In yet another reminder of how much I do not know, I recently learned about ombre. At first, I pronounced it wrong—om-burr. Now, since it is French, I am still pronouncing it slightly wrong, despite the Internet’s best assistance. Its real sound is somewhere between om-bray and oom-bruh.
Ombre is French for shading—a marvelous word implying the fade from one color to another, darker to lighter, a gradual shift. Ombre is also a three-person card game that Europe loved in the 17th and 18th centuries, but I have failed to connect those definitions. I have also failed to stop thinking about the gradual shift in shades of color since my exposure to ombre.
Ombre seems to capture the passage of time in one frame. On a single wall, you can paint the sky changing from dark to dawn to daylight. The ombre hairstyle, dark near the scalp and light at the ends, is like a time-lapse of growing your blonde dye job back into your natural brunette, but where you choose to have both colors coexist. Across the spring days, the trees shift from grey to green, but for an hour on a single morning, the fog paints ombre on the woods. I am now watching everywhere for shading, changing.
A woman turning forty might contain her own ombre—the darker weight of her thirties easing into a lightness of loving herself even when she disappoints people. A nation holds many gradients in a single moment, all of the literal and metaphorical light and dark—seeming sharply divided, but perhaps more mingled, with more intermediate, connecting shades than we tend to realize.
Ombre seems also to describe the space between the living and the dead. Voices blend at this Saturday’s memorial service. Their music translates ombre into sound, filling our heads and chests with the harmonies of How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place, folding and fading. People speak, painting my uncle’s life in words, some heavier or deeper with color, others brighter, glowing.
A handful of cousins meet afterwards in a restaurant, barely knowing each other, but we laugh together and taste each other’s drinks. We are comfortable in the gradient of our beliefs and experiences, connected in the space between our unique lives and our shared grandparents.
This morning, I paint our kitchen cabinets and listen to virtuoso musician Edgar Meyer, unaccompanied on the double bass. I ride the music from growling low to trembling high, soft to intense, slow to buzzingly fast. I am rolling pale grey and darker grey across the wooden doors. Between one tone and another, I find the richness in ombre.
