'There is one thing I don't get,' I said.
'What's that?'
'How come if your favourite colour is blue, you painted your house so pink?'
She laughed. 'That was May's doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the colour. I had a nice tan colour in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, "Well, this is the tackiest colour I've ever seen, and we'll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May's heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it." '
'All this time I figured you just liked pink,' I said.
She laughed again. 'You know, some things don't matter that much Lily. Like the colour of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart- now, that matters. The whole problem with people is-'
'They don't know what matters and what doesn't,' I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.
'I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don't choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.'
The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd
