February, the month of love, is drawing to a close, with the announcement of St Mary’s excellent matric results and the landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars, the colour of the moment –Valentine’s Day, our school and the fourth planet from the sun – surely should be red.

So, why did the Senior Primary girls and I spend so much time last week talking about yellow?

On 9 December 2020, the American company Pantone did what it has been doing for two decades since the dawn of the new century: it named its Color of the Year, an event that is eagerly awaited by furniture, textile, fashion, accessory and technology designers the world over, but which might pass by the rest of us unwitting consumers of seasonal coloured toothbrushes, swimsuits, nail polish and exterior paint options.

For the first time since 2016 when the institute named Rose Quartz and Serenity as its Colors of the Year in recognition of the increasing fluidity of gender norms, Pantone has selected two shades for 2021: Ultimate Gray and Illuminating – chosen, the marketing material explains, for their dependability and warmth.

The selection of Illuminating also marks the second time that yellow has featured in the final line-up: in 2009, as Barack Obama entered the White House, the prevailing mood was optimistic, and no other colour, so the experts tell us, “expresses hope and reassurance like Mimosa, the most uplifting shade of yellow.”

Commenting on Pantone’s decision this year in greater depth (and reaching ever greater lyrical heights) Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, said the following about the union of an enduring gray with a vibrant yellow: “Practical and rock solid but at the same time warming and optimistic, this is a color combination that gives us resilience and hope.”

Reflecting on the year that was, the Pantone Institute pointed to 2020 as a time of upheaval and protest in America “when social distancing became par for the course and people organized en masse across the nation to call for racial justice.” The conclusion they reached, that the importance of connection is at the forefront of many people’s minds, applies as much in South Africa, and at St Mary’s, as anywhere else in the world.

And this is where, perhaps, for all its seeming triviality, Pantone’s Color of the Year campaign verges on the profound.

If nothing else, it serves to remind us of the essential, enabling relationship between the shiny moments of light and illumination and the dependable grey bedrock that grounds them. This is Amanda Gorman’s sunshine yellow coat, her luminescent words at the presidential inauguration and the hard work that needs to be undertaken by an administration led by the oldest man to assume the presidency in American history; it is the matric results supported by years of foundation work by teachers from different schools, and it is the return of the daily ringing of the Angelus in the big picture of endeavour and effort that constitutes our school.

SARAH WARNER

JUNIOR SCHOOL HEADMISTRESS