Colour your life

Life is all about colours. We associate colours with feelings, e.g. red for passion, love, anger, blue for calm, coldness, green for envy, jealousy, newbie, white for purity, black for evil, etc., etc....

So how do you want to colour your life?

Mine has been a rainbow of sorts. I coloured some of it while others added colour to my life. Friends, family, hostile people, strangers...... they have coloured my life.

Yesterday I had a happy rainbow day...... a dash of red for love, some blue for the calmness I felt and a mixture of emotions, mostly happy ones. Why was I so happy?

It was a Saturday and after a lovely chicken rice lunch with my grandchildren, I brought in the keropok ( dried prawn crackers ) which had been sunned for a couple of hours and began to fry them. Stephen and Chloe had requested for these giant keropok. They called it "giant" because when it is fried, it expands to 3 times its original size. They stood beside me in the kitchen watching as the hard rectangular piece of keropok expanded in the hot cooking oil. Piece by piece the keropok was fried and as each piece cooled, Chloe would break off a small piece and pop it into my mouth. The three of us ate as the keropok was fried. Stephen would then pop a segment of tangerine into my mouth when he saw that I had swallowed my keropok. He loves these tiny tangerines which are available only during the Chinese New Year period or early part of the year. He was enjoying them as he peeled away the skin and ate it one tiny segment at a time. He enjoyed popping these tiny segments into my mouth even as he savoured his. When the keropok was fried and had cooled down, they packed it away in the large tupperware container to be savoured later when their mummy returned home from work.

Being with these two in the kitchen, sharing little morsels was indeed an occasion to treasure and to tuck away in my memory bank. The hot oil was too risky for them to try frying the keropok but at other times, they tried their hand at stirfrying a vegetable or even stirring the rice as it was being fried. Indeed it is such times that make my day, enjoying little moments like these. Watching them grow is such a privilege and joy.

I had the wonderful opportunity to take care of them from when they were babies and now they are already in elementary school. It was like being given a second chance at child rearing, and this time round, there is lots more time than when my own children were young. Those days we were busy with our careers and had hardly sufficient time to play and talk with them. But now with the grandchildren it's totally different. When they are home from school, and on weekends when they are not occupied with their other activities, grandma has time with them.

Showing them the plants in the garden and picking up the caterpillars which had eaten away the beautiful green leaves of the potted plants, showing them how to water the garden, etc.... these are the stuff of beautiful memories.

In turn they show me YouTube, their online games and they even taught their grandfather how to google. The children of today are amazing. They are adventurous and not afraid to try out new things. Initially I was terrified that the computer would kaput if I pressed the wrong key but watching these children hammering away at the keys gives me a little more confidence. The machine won't disintegrate!

These two children are my little rainbows and just as they colour my life, I'm also putting some colour into theirs. I hope all of us will have a beautiful poster of colourful memories.