My friend Selena suggested the color orange.

There’s a song that my mother used to listen to when I was a kid… a Leonard Cohen song called Suzanne, though she only ever listened to the covers recorded by Joan Baez and Judy Collins. I never cared much for the song – it’s kind of monotonous and makes me feel like maybe you can only really appreciate it if you’re kind of stoned – but there’s a line in it, “and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China” that has always captivated me.

To this day the color orange is tied to both the fruit and the tea for me, and I really like the combination of both together.

I’ve always been really nocturnal, and when I was in high school, I loved to be the last one awake at night. I would wait until everyone else was asleep and then creep down to the kitchen and brew a pot of tea – nothing special – just whatever was around. Sometimes plain old Lipton and sometimes something else. (Nowadays I’m as picky about tea as I am about coffee, but then, I took what I could get.)

I would take the tea to the table with a cup and milk and sugar, because I did that then, and a few oranges, and I would sip tea and read books late into the night, or, if I wasn’t in the mood to read, I would fill notebooks with stories.

No, I don’t still own the notebooks. I have no idea what happened to them all.

I love the way even the blackest of black teas, once brewed, is a deep orange-amber-brown color. I love the way tangerines are almost fizzy when you bite into them and their juice bursts onto your tongue.

Oranges are my go-to fruit in winter. I use navel oranges for most things, but we also buy those easy-peel clementines – the ones that are marketed for children – even though we don’t have kids, and we eat them like candy.

I could talk more about orange… I could talk about the Golden Gate bridge and the perfect sunset and how it’s a punch of color when you include it in a bouquet or a vase of flowers, but I think I’ll stick with the fruit.

Oh, except that I’ll mention that my new hair stylist has me hooked on Kevin Murphy’s haircare lines, so now my hair smells like an orange creamsicle all the time, which makes me grin.

My friend Fran asked me to talk about the color Teal.

Originally, I was going to combine it with turquoise, but I decided it would be cheating. Besides, teal it’s a distinctly different color.

To me, teal is the color of ice skating.

I don’t remember learning to ice skate; it’s just something my mother and I always did when I was a kid. I remember skating with her on Deal Lake in New Jersey, and on the foot-thick rippled ice of the frozen reservoir in Georgetown, when they hadn’t yet frozen over the baseball diamond.

I remember weekend trips to the ski resorts in Loveland and Vail where we would skate instead of ski – I lived in Colorado for seven years and never learned to ski – and I would complain because I was wearing itchy thermal socks over tights under my jeans and I would be sweaty and cold and skated out long before the adults were ready to go home.

I remember holding Benjamin’s hand when we skated at ice rinks in Colorado – both of us in those double-bladed skates designed for wobbly children and Donny Osmond.

And I remember, in the winter before we all wanted those sneakers with roller skate wheels attached, that my friends and I would go to the rink at the Y in Arvada Colorado twice a week after school to participate in the open skate.

I never took lessons – none of us did – but we learned to scissor our feet and use the right edges, and do simple spins and tiny jumps even without formal training. We learned to shoot the duck and race around the rink, and sometimes we even wore cute little skating skirts to do it, but mostly we just wore jeans.

After we moved to California, Mom and I stopped skating, until the year before I met Fuzzy. That was the year the Sharks moved to San Jose, and they opened their training center for open skating in order to offset costs.

Mom and I went to one of the first sessions, but the rental skates were horrible, so we went directly to the pro-shop to buy proper figure skates. I’ve never been a particular hockey fan, but the rookies have to work in the pro-shop and when a soulful Russian or Finnish hockey player is holding your foot in his huge hand and asking you, in accented English what size shoe you wear, and saying “You vill com vatch us play, yes?” How can you say no?

And yet, I never made it to a live Sharks game, even though I lived only a short walk away from the Shark Tank for several years.

In fact, the only time we ever went there was for figure skating shows – it was a tradition that I went every year with Mom. But then she moved to Baja Sur, Mexico, and I moved to Texas, where the ice shows never come.

And my skates, my beautiful white figure skates, sit unused on the shelf of my hall closet, their blades protected by rubber guards in… guess what color? Naah, I’ll just tell you: teal.