The Color Poppy

Poppy flowers, to the best of my knowledge, come in one primary shade of color, orange. (Although I have seen a variant of them in other pastels, but they're not nearly as common in our neck of the woods, nor are they as beautiful in my opinion.) Most commonly they're bright, delicate and prolific during the Spring months of the year. These adjectives properly convey our little Poppy-flower, but I can assure you that she's not prolific; there's only one Poppy Mae Zu Qiao, and she's a Kruggel. Her true colors began to shine about six months after we adopted her, which is actually about the same amount of time it took for Willow to fully blossom as well. Poppy is sweet, adorable, funny, tender, loving, and sensitive. She's also a lot of other things that are not quite as pleasant, but I won't mention those here; besides they're the same unattractive things we can all be from time to time.

This last piece of artwork from Annie displays some of the varied faces of our little pop-tart. One of her most defining facial features is her eyes. They're unusually round, but also dark, brown, and glossy. She makes excellent eye-contact when you're talking to her and she's good at communicating with them, both out of sincerity and sometimes with ulterior motives. When she laughs really hard they almost close entirely. She also sleeps with a portion of her eyelids open, which is a little bizarre to see. Regardless, they're always captivating to us, and they're what drew us into her the moment we met her. I think Annie's done an exceptional job of capturing some of her different looks with her eyes in this drawing. I also love the center faces of Annie and Poppy together; they love each other immensely.

Back to the color motif, Poppy has brought a whole new meaning to the color orange for us. As it's a blend of the primary colors of red and yellow, so is Poppy. Red is stimulating, exciting and attention gathering. In China, red represents the uniform color of the national flag, and also symbolizes the primary element of fire, the direction South, and the season of Summer. The color yellow on the other hand shines with optimism, happiness and creativity. In China, the color yellow represents the primary element of earth, and is also the center of all directions (whether North, South, East or West). So mixing the meanings of these two colors together gives us the name of a little girl from China that is all of these things and more. She's the perfect blend, stirred together by the perfect Artist.

The color Poppy is perfectly providential.

Tom (& Victoria)