Amanda van Scoyoc

Cerulean Pumpkin Van Zoeren has been a part of our daily lives for a little over six months now. She was our first foster dog and we completely failed to ever give her back, shirking our duties. She spent the first four months of her life in a meth van in Oregon with a couple of people and quite a few of her dog relatives. We have been told that she was meth addicted from licking the powder off of her paws and initially was quite aggressive. This could be true, or it could be an Oregon tall tale. We’ll never know. She was never nervous with us. The only remnant of her past seems to be a profound lack of trust for scruffy looking men, which is actually quite useful at times. We tend to mostly not trust the same guys who come knocking at the door. However, she does not trust the postman. This I do not understand. He is nice guy, is not scruffy and is a constant visitor. I cannot reason with Cerie about certain things.

Her name was Pumpkin, which needed to go. Eli and I settled on Cerulean, and we call her Cerie. I had always thought that Cerulean would be a great kid’s name. It is the name of the color of the sky, and as a painter, cerulean is my favorite pigment. Cerulean hue, the cheap mixed form of the pigment, is made from cyan and white. It is an overpowering chalky mixture that blends terribly. Until late in college, I didn’t understand the differences in hues and pigments. I always had fairly cheap oil paints. Then a painting professor of mine made me go out and get the real stuff, the cadmium red and yellow, the lead white, the alizarin crimson, and yes, the real cerulean. I remember that first nude portrait with new paints learning just what cerulean can do. See, it blends away into skin’s shadows. It is a clean light blue with no white, an unsaturated pigment that allows shadows to mellow to blues or purples the way that they really do. It is a secret color that is infused in my paintings, but you would never know because you won’t see the blue, just the darkening, the coolness, the depth.

I imagined one day having a child that would be like the color cerulean. It would be able to blend into different places and situations, softly, silently, making them more beautiful, making them just right. This was the meaning behind the name. Eli rejected it and to be absolutely certain that I wouldn’t continue to fight for our first born son to be “Cerulean,” he suggested that Pumpkin become Cerie, and now she is.

Cerie is not subtle. She bounds into rooms and overtakes them. She hurdles her body about and overwhelms people. The name in no way suits her, but it is hers.

We didn’t think that we were ready for a dog, but then there she was, this unmistakable part of our lives that we couldn’t possibly return to the shelter. With last year being quite a difficult academic year for me, we were trying to focus on creating a life for ourselves. We were lonely in this new place. I felt lost without the artistic community that I had in Durham, in Boston, and Philadelphia. At times I felt like I was heading down an endless path towards a life of a statistician, when all I really wanted was to go back to doing things that I cared so much more deeply about. And then suddenly on another rainy cold Oregon day (which is all days for 9 months), Cerie was there trying to convince me that this morning was going to be the best morning yet. She was there so happy to have us, and perhaps last year, that was exactly what we needed.

I still find it strange to think that she has never been to the east coast. She was born out west and this is her home. I still feel transient here, but she is completely at ease, and in her element. I see how comfortable she is with us and I realize that somehow Eli and I have made this yellow half-of-a-house her delightful home. She has nothing to fear here except for the occasional scruffy-looking man, or the nice-looking postman. Besides that, life here with us is pretty great. Watching the ease at which she lives her life with us, little by little she is convincing me that things here might just be alright as well. Maybe that is the little bit of Cerulean hidden inside of her.