#How are we all enjoying the swath of yellow rose petals | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nationalharryleague · 3 years

Text

In the Long Green Grass

Pairing: Harry Styles x Reader

Genre: the fluffiest fluff with husband!harry

Word count: 2K

A/N: Hi everyone!! Merry Christmas to all that celebrate!! this is my Secret Santa (run and organized by the lovely lu (@meetmymouth) gift to the sweetest angel who walks among us miss hasibi (@peachybloomss)!!! I hope you enjoy it my love!!! More of my writing can be found in my masterlist and I would love to hear what everyone thinks in my ask! Thank you so much for reading!!

***

You were stirred by the sounds of the waves crashing against the cliff outside the home as the early morning sun streamed in through the windows. A small huf and whine left your lips, always one to ask for just five more minutes in bed, before you climbed from underneath the warm plush blankets and your toes hit the icy and worn wood floors beneath you.

The buttery yellow sunlight thwarted your plans to fight yourself back to sleep for those last few moments, prompting you to reach out your arms in a longing stretch. You released a light and sleepy hum of surprise when your arm hit a tiny furry body, and not the arm of the man who loved to sleep late in the bed beside you. Peeping one eye open, you made eye contact with Piper, Harry’s small jet black cat with glowing green eyes who was laying next to you, curled up on sheets that still held the indent of his body in them.

Piper wore a face of annoyance, obviously blaming you for interrupting her precious beauty sleep, and her eyes followed your body as you forced yourself out of the bed with one goal: find Harry.

Harry had a habit of disappearing, especially in a new place where there was just so much to explore. He was a wanderer (and an aquarius); always on the move, carried along by a thought or idea he just couldn’t resist. It was hard for him to sit still, a trait he probably picked up after tour after tour after tour, never allowing himself the luxury of rest or relaxation after it was never allowed to him. That was why you had insisted he needed time away from the city, finding a perfect spot in a small cottage that sat on the edge of a cliff along the ocean with a back garden full of sweet smelling flowers and tall cushony grass.

You tiptoed carefully down the spiral staircase that lovingly let out groans underfoot, still rubbing the sleep out of your eyes, into a kitchen that looked straight out of a fairytale. It was small with moss green cabinets and large bay windows that filled the space with light that kept the seemingly hundreds of plants in the house happy and thriving. A cool ocean breeze came in through the open windows of the small breakfast nook, bringing along the scent of a fresh pot of coffee that sat on the butcher block countertops like it had been waiting for you to wake all along. While you felt a jump of excitement within you for the coffee, it still hadn’t been what (or who) you were looking for, even though you were very glad you found it.

A sweet cup of coffee was thoughtfully prepared in a tea cup you had found in the cabinet with small wisteria flowers painted around it’s rim. You knew Harry would poke fun at your cup choice if he were there. “Tea cups are for tea,” you could hear him say, perking up the edges of your mouth into a gentle smile as you sipped it carefully. But the flowers reminded you of the beautiful wisteria tree that flowed in the wind and scattered it’s petals all over the back garden; you just couldn’t pass it up.

It took you quite a while to find him, even with the new found caffeinated energy running through your system. You had run into the two other cats at the house, both rather chubby tabbys named Jack and Gus, that called this back garden home on your search and you obviously had to say good morning. The two rubbed themselves up against your legs, begging for a scratch behind the ear and a bit of attention, and you obliged. Who were you to deny them of it?

The garden the cats got to call home was a dream. It was filled with every variety of colorful flower imaginable and blanketed in a sweet air that always hovered over the space. Your favorites were the small peachy blooms that smelled of sugary perfume. A stone fence ran the perimeter of the yard, a white picket fence in the middle opening to a swath of overgrown grass that swayed in the wind on a hill. If you squinted, you could see the house of the couple you were renting the cottage from, but they were far enough away it felt like you were the only people around for miles.

When you spotted a Harry-shaped hole in the tall grass up the hill, you had a sneaking suspicion you had found your missing husband.

The tall grass squished beneath your feet as you climbed the hill, creating a soft padding below, and the long blades tickled against your bare legs as you made your way towards him, still only dressed in one of his perfectly worn t-shirts from the night before.

“There you are,” you hummed happily when you reached him, standing above him as he layed in the grass. “I thought that I lost you.”

He looked like a renaissance painting as he laid in the grass that was dotted with small pink and purple wildflowers. His curls had gotten a little longer during his much needed break and they splayed out around his head in delicate ringlets like a halo. The light from the still rising sun bounced off his slightly dewy skin, giving him a glow that lit him up even more than usual. Stubble danced across his cheeks and jaw, framing his perfectly pink lips that held a gentle smile as he looked up at you from the ground. And his eyes squinted slightly, shielding his pupils from the ever growing brightness of the sky, creating delicate little wrinkles around his sea glass green eyes that looked so vibrant in the light.

A worn book that you hadn’t seen before, bound in dark green leather with gold detailing, sat on his chest; Poems for Lovers: A Collection was embossed delicately across the cover.

“You’ll never lose me,” he mumbled up at you, a gravel in his voice like it was the first time he had used it that day. You had been married for almost two years and had been together for five, but your cheeks never failed to redden when he spoke sweet nothings like that. “Good morning, angel,” he said softly, reaching his hand up for yours.

You moved to place your hand in his, but ended up only linking your pinkies together in the process; a light tug from the man below you signaled for you to join him on the ground. You couldn’t resist, sitting yourself down with your legs crossed in front of you on the slightly damp ground next to him, pinkies still locked together.

“Morning,” you greeted. “I missed you in bed. Piper isn’t much of a cuddler,” you chuckled while absentmindedly playing with his fingers, twirling his wedding band.

“She’s not very nice, is she?” he smiled, opening his eyes fully to meet yours as you strategically moved your body to block his delicate eyes from the sun. “I’m sorry my cat’s a bitch,” he joked. “She still thinks she’s my number one girl.”

“I tell her I’m sorry that I stole her spot in bed all the time, she never listens. Won’t even have a civil chat with me about it,” you teased sarcastically.

Harry let out an enthusiastic giggle at your words; it was high pitched, and came from his belly in loud bursts of air. His cheeks scrunched up and forced his eyes closed because he was smiling so wide, crinkling the corners of his eyes once again. His laughter was infectious and you couldn’t help but join in.

You two must have looked insane, sitting in the grass in a field in the middle of nowhere just after dawn, laughing like idiots. But you wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Well, a few more hours of sleep wouldn’t have hurt.

As your gigges died down, you turned your attention to the book resting on his chest. “You ditched me in bed for a book?” you teased, letting the remaining laughter escape your body.

“I couldn’t sleep and I found it on one of the bookshelves. I thought it would be nice to read in the grass and watch the sun come up.”

“You should have woken me up. I could have thought of a few things we could have done to tire you out.” A smirk played on your lips as you tapped your chin, pretending to think, as you watched his eyes grow in amusement from your innuendo.

“You looked too peaceful sleeping. Also, drool and bedhead don’t really turn me on if I’m being honest.” It was your turn to react to his teasing.

Your jaw dropped in feigned offence and your finger flew over your shoulder to point back at the cottage. “I can go back if you’d like your privacy,” you said incredulously and with dramatics, until a few chuckles broke through and your resolve softened once again.

“Oh no no no,” he spoke with a grin, “come here,” moving the book and tapping his chest for you to rest your head on. You turned yourself around to lay yourself on the ground, placing your head on his chest and listening to his steady and calming heartbeat.

“How are your poems?” you asked, referencing the book he was now holding in his hands.

“They are very good. I’m glad I found it.” His voice reverberated under your head as he spoke, and you rose and fell softly with his breath.

“Read me your favorite.”

“Okay,” he began, thumbing through the pages as he held the book above both your heads. You listened as he let out a small “ah, here it is,” before he dramatically cleared his throat. “You might remember me talking about this one already, but I love it.”

You knew he loved it before he even began reading anything. He loved his poetry, especially when they were about love. Harry was a hopeless romantic at heart, often saying to you and interviewers “I just love love.” He loved falling in love with you and becoming a team, just as much as you did with him.

“It’s called The Wait,” he spoke gently, his voice taking on a deeper and more enunciated quality. You recognized the poem immediately, as it was the one referenced on his pants for the Vogue cover shoot. He had dedicated it to you then, and was doing it again now in the grass. “It seemed like years before I picked a bouquet of kisses off her mouth and put them into a dawn-colored vase in my heart,” he began. He spoke slowly and smoothly with the consistency and sweetness of honey. “But the wait was worth it,” he continued. “Because I was in love.”

You couldn’t help but think of your own story as he read. He had chased after you for years, with you always insisting that he was your best friend and you were afraid to ruin that. But gradually, your best friend became your lover, and your lover became your husband.

“I like that one a lot too.” You spoke softly and with reflection. “It reminds me of us.”

“That’s why it’s my favorite.”

You two layed in the grass for hours, not a care in the world, as he read from the book. Every poem took you two on a journey into a love story, one that for the two of you only existed on the page, but told of a very real love that couldn’t have been dishonestly written.

But with how you felt in the moment, with the joy and loving warmth you felt in your belly, you were sure you could write a million poems about the love you had with him.

Thank you so much for reading!! Reblogs/feedback mean the world!!!

#I hope you like it honey!!!!#harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fanfic #harry styles one shot #harry styles fluff #Harry styles Drabble #harry styles blurb #harry styles imagine #harry styles #harry styles x you #harry styles x y/n #harry styles x reader #one direction fanfic #one direction #meetmygift2020 #my writing #harryandhockey

740 notes · View notes

nofomoartworld · 7 years

Text

Hyperallergic: A Western Cultural History of Pink, from Madame de Pompadour to Pussy Hats

View of the Women’s March on Washington from the roof of the Voice of America building in Washington, D.C. (image via Wikimedia)

Visitors to the official website of the Pussyhat Project are welcomed with an exclamation of color and joy from founders Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman: “We did it! We created a sea of pink!” And indeed they did. The Women’s March on Washington, D.C., and the 600 allied marches across the United States and the world, drew between 3.3 and 4.6 million protesters, making it one of the largest single-day demonstrations in the nation’s history. Suh and Zweiman launched the Pussyhat Project in advance of the march with the goal of having one million hats on hand, and their website includes PDF patterns for knit, sewn, and crocheted versions, which have collectively been downloaded more than 100,000 times. The resulting sea of cat hats caused a run on pink yarn across the country and quickly became a powerful visual shorthand for this particular swath of anti-Trump protest movements.

The message of the color pink is so powerful that it rarely needs explanation. We all know what it implies: it’s feminine, frilly, cheery, and delicate, certainly not a color we expect to see on, say, the cover of a scientific journal. It is often used to stand in for character development, as in the 2001 movie Legally Blonde, in which it’s implied that the pink-clad sorority girl Elle Woods, who carries a pink-accessorized chihuahua for good measure, can’t possibly be serious about applying to Harvard Law School. A claque of superficial teenage girls is similarly characterized in the 2004 film Mean Girls (“On Wednesdays, we wear pink,” says the alpha.) Unlike red, which flexibly symbolizes both Communism and the GOP, pink is so precisely coded that it’s almost impossible to misunderstand its intent. For this reason, pink tends to be either loved or loathed.

This happened yesterday in San Francisco! Were you there? We see a mini sea of pink. Resist, dear ones. And may we never stop Stefan Ruenzel

A post shared by Pussyhat Project (@p_ssyhatproject) on Feb 12, 2017 at 5:04am PST

The Women’s March managed the tricky feat of eliciting criticism from both the right and the left, and one of the themes of that criticism has been the Pussyhat Project, and its signature color, in particular. A week before the March, Petula Dvorak admonished her readers in the Washington Post: “Please, sisters, back away from the pink.” Dvorak argued that pussy hats risked trivializing the message of the Women’s March, and she focused much of her critique on their color and crafting. Her language is telling: She writes of “pink pussycat hats, sparkly signs, and color-coordinated street theater,” as well as “she-power frippery,” then goes on to describe the imagined march as “an unruly river of Pepto-Bismol roiling through the streets.” Noting that the issues at stake for women in the Trump era are “serious stuff,” Dvorak makes the case for equal pay and reproductive rights, asserting her feminist bona fides, then goes on to mock pussy hats as “totally clever and cute and fun” — a clear dig based on negative stereotypes of young women’s speech. And in his predictably tone-deaf post-mortem of the march in the New York Times, the conservative opinion writer David Brooks proposed that the whole exercise was mired in the dead-end rituals of lefty identity politics and that its props and crutches were distractions disguising a lack of real substance from which a coherent anti-Trump agenda might arise. He singles out “pink hats” for disdain, and his lack of any descriptors to characterize them makes his logic clear: It goes without saying that pink is unserious. But why?

Portrait of Madame de Pompadour by Maurice Quentin de la Tour, painted between 1748 and 1755, Musée du Louvre (via Wikimedia)

Pink’s cultural history is complicated. Its first real moment in the spotlight was during the European Rococo period, when it became a favorite hue for fashion, confections, tableware, and the lighthearted frolicking depicted in the Romantic paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Madame de Pompadour, the chief mistress of Louis XV, famously loved pink clothes, and she commissioned a bright pink porcelain service from Sèvres, which developed a new color for the set called Rose Pompadour in 1757. But throughout this period, pink was more strongly associated with style and luxury than with a particular gender. Quoted in a 2013 article in The Atlantic, fashion historian and Director of the Museum at FIT Valerie Steele notes that “in the 18th century, it was perfectly masculine for a man to wear a pink silk suit with floral embroidery.” Pink was still understood primarily as a paler version of red — a bold, even bellicose color that had military associations.

Soft-paste porcelain Potpourri vase, Sèvres Manufactory (French, 1740–present), modeled by Jean-Claude Duplessis (French, ca. 1695–1774, active 1748–74), ca. 1757–58, Gift of Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1958 (image via Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Even more surprising is the fact that light blue — which, as many a modern-day sex-reveal cake will confirm, is virtually synonymous with the phrase “it’s a boy!” — was more strongly associated with female children until just after World War II. Sociologist Jo B. Paoletti, whose book Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America traces the history of color and gender in children’s clothing, writes that for most of the 19th century, the go-to color for dressing infants of both sexes was white. This was partly for practical reasons: Dyes during this period were apt to fade with repeated washing, particularly the boil-washing and bleaching required to keep baby clothes clean, so there wasn’t much point in spending money on fashionably hued garments for infants. The second reason is that, at the time, babies’ perceived gender ambiguity was viewed not as a problem to be solved with a color-coded headband, but as a virtue to be cherished and protected. Gender was understood as a component of adult sexuality, which in turn was considered taboo in the context of young children. If prepubescent children were “innocent,” they were to be only vaguely gendered. As color became a potent branding tool in the first decades of the 20th century, pink and blue emerged as interchangeable colors for children’s clothing and nursery décor, along with pale yellow and green. And sometimes pink was perceived as more appropriate for little boys, owing to its relationship to the robust and “masculine” red. But, according to Paoletti, well into the 1920s, there was little consensus on the part of department stores and women’s periodicals as to which color was properly assigned to which gender, and many parents simply gravitated to whatever looked more attractive on their child.

How and when did this change? “There was no sudden, unanimous cultural shift,” Paoletti writes in Pink and Blue. “It evolved over decades. At the same time, clothing manufacturers did their best to anticipate those choices better than their competitors and to shape those choices in order to make them more predictable and profitable.” In other words, it may not have happened overnight, but it was clearly the influence of manufacturing and marketing in the postwar United States that caused the gendered assignments of pink for girls and blue for boys to stick for good.

Print ad for Hotpoint Stoves, 1956 (image via Flickr)

Pink emerged as one of the dominant hues in the 1950s at precisely the moment when American women were whisked off the wartime assembly line and back into the kitchen. Thanks to the postwar proliferation of suburban tract housing with brand new appliances in fashion colors, American homes simultaneously became more explicitly gendered and more actively color-coded than ever before. In her book The Color Revolution, design historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk finds one of the earliest moments of pink’s emergence in, of all places, the preppy men’s retailer Brooks Brothers, which in 1949 opened a department store just for women on 5th Avenue and introduced a popular line of pink blouses that got major publicity in the fashion press. This, combined with First Lady Mamie Eisenhower’s fondness for a shade that became known as “First Lady Pink,” helped propel the color into American shops and homes. Unlike Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s version, Shocking Pink, which enjoyed a somewhat avant-garde moment in the late 1930s, First Lady Pink was soft and subdued.

Mamie Eisenhower in her inaugural gown, painted in 1953 by Thomas Stevens (via Wikimedia)

After pink conquered the fashion world, Blaszczyk writes, Armstrong premiered pink vinyl flooring and General Electric started selling “Petal Pink” appliances. Scores of competitors quickly followed suit. For women in the 1950s who were old enough to remember cast iron stoves, a pink cooktop and a matching floor would have been a revelation. The novel colors and sleek designs of the postwar period transformed kitchens from hot, uncomfortable workspaces into natural extensions of a feminized, comfortable, and stylish home. “Linked with the idea of female childhood,” writes Penny Sparke in her 1995 book As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, “[pink] represented the distinctive gendering that underpinned 1950s society, ensuring that women were women and men were men. Gendering had to start at an early age, and parents were the key role models. The use of pink in the home emphasized the essential femininity of girls and women, and it showed daughters that their mothers understood this and wished them to recognize the distinctiveness of their gender as well.” Unsurprisingly, one of the main critiques of the limits of postwar life for middle-class American women was that it was akin to playing house. Betty Friedan famously characterized housewives as “childlike” and “passive” in The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

With pink’s complex lineage, it’s useful to think of its cultural footprint as intersectional. While its feminine association with gender is now unquestioned, it’s also a symbol, perhaps more crucially, of age. More than womanhood per se, pink represents girlhood, and it can be understood as a gendered yet asexual marker of femininity. Like the all-in-white infants of the 19th century, today’s little girls are awash in pink — a global phenomenon beautifully captured by the South Korean artist JeongMee Yoon in her “Pink and Blue Project.” But adult women are pinkified, too: The Breast Cancer Awareness movement has all but co-opted pink through advertising, product design, and even museum exhibition sponsorship, as in the well-received 2013 show Think Pink, which was on view at the MFA Boston in October 2013 (during Breast Cancer Awareness month). When we seek a pretty razor with a built-in dab of sweet-smelling moisturizer, we pay the “pink tax” to buy a product for women that’s nearly identical to its dark blue or steel gray (and less expensive) male counterpart.

JeongMee Yoon, “The Pink Project II: Lauren & Carolyn and Their Pink & Purple Things” (2009), light jet print (image courtesy of the artist)

So as consumers and activists today, when we embrace pink, are we proudly reclaiming a color that has been unfairly maligned and prone to sexist ridicule, or are we just falling into an advertiser’s trap? And conversely, when we denigrate pink, are we simply being reactionary, carping about an innocuous cultural trait the way radio listeners complain about vocal fry? It’s impossible to untangle the 1950s gendering campaign that made pink so pervasive from the sexism inherent to the era. We can’t know if we perceive pink the way we do because it became associated with women, or indeed if it became associated with women because it had been associated with childhood, and housewives were not perceived as fully adult. This netherworld of the not-quite-grownup woman is evident in pink’s cultural symbolism even now. While breasts are as sexualized as ever in popular culture, the Breast Cancer Awareness movement’s devotion to pink seems like a clear attempt to recast an illness that primarily afflicts a female erogenous zone (although men can also suffer from breast cancer) as something girlish, even prepubescent. Likewise, the Pussyhat Project took its name from the Access Hollywood tapes that record Donald Trump describing how and where a male celebrity can “grab” women. Though they have been referred to as “vagina hats” by critics on the right, in an attempt to vulgar-shame the protesters, the hats themselves, handmade and cozy, are more akin to stuffed animals than sultry clothing.

WOW Um, good morning! We woke up and there were #pussyhats on @theviewabc! Photo by @the_lemonade_shop

A post shared by Pussyhat Project (@p_ssyhatproject) on Jan 18, 2017 at 10:25am PST

I personally like pink quite a bit, even as I’m keenly aware of the machinations of the pink-industrial complex. On one hand, I resent the implication that women are being silly when they wear pink, and on the other, I resent the notion that girlishness is itself synonymous with frivolity. I happen to have been a pretty serious little girl, even as I wore pink stirrup pants in the 1980s. Yet we tie ourselves in knots trying to outrun the misogyny that’s both within and outside us. As the symbol of Code Pink and Act Up’s iconic and highly effective Silence = Death campaign, which referenced the pink triangle that was used by Nazis to identify gay men in concentration camps during World War II, pink has done some serious heavy lifting in social justice movements. It may do us all some good to reconsider pink as an unironic color of protest, and in doing so, to help exorcise some of our impulses to denigrate the color of girlhood. Since its cousin red is the color of war, I like to think that pink could become the hue of nonviolent battle, and that learning to embrace it may be a very small first step toward ending the war on women for good.

The post A Western Cultural History of Pink, from Madame de Pompadour to Pussy Hats appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2lnzdhw via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Hyperallergic

0 notes