We were looking at houses in Front Royal, a small Virginia town sixty miles west of Washington DC at the confluence of the North and South forks of the Shenandoah River and tucked at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This sounds lovely, but it used to be called

The Perfect Shade of Purple In the springtime, the center bay window at the back of my house, the one in the breakfast nook that we’ve turned into a sitting nook, turns purple. Other times of the year when I look through this window, I see the green of grass