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Fittingly, the first day of the Blogging from A to Z Challenge 2014 is Orange Tuesday, and my theme for the challenge is color.

As a girl from Canada, I spent grade 4 in El Paso, TX, my parents’ home town, while my father was on sabbatical.  I went into Spanish class behind all the kids who had taken Spanish since Kindergarten, or who already knew the language.  My Spanish teacher was encouraging, and I enjoyed drawing and labeling my familiar world in unfamiliar words.

I learned the names for colors, like anaranjado for orange tinted, named for the fruit naranja, the orange.  In illustrating surprise, my subject had orange socks and an orange sweater.  She looks creepily tranformed by the surprise, all the blue drained from her eyes, and an open mouth as if to scream.

Later, I realized I knew the Spanish color for green already, in the dish my mother made, Chile Verde.