You know those people movers they have in airports? The ones where you think ‘should I or shouldn’t I’ because you know that you really do need the exercise and you should walk but they are so appealing. The way they stretch out for as far as the eye can see, and you don’t really have to move a muscle to get from A to B if you don’t want to. I certainly need the exercise but succumb to its lure almost every time.

I am one of those people who rush past and, under my breath, admonish those people who stand left when they should stand right because I am always in a blurred rush. Monday morning as I bolted through the Minneapolis airport, I noticed a woman, going in the opposite direction on the people mover, passing me while concentrating on her blackberry which only caught my eye because it had a bright pink case. I really liked her spot of pink and felt this odd urge to say hello, which I didn’t do because we were passing at warp speeds, and she probably would have thought I was a nut bar.

Do you think that color has power? I’ve heard that certain colors are soothing while others can illicit excitement or pleasant thoughts. It is undeniable that the woman’s pink blackberry case had an emotional effect on me, but what was it? Pink isn’t one of my favorite colors. I didn’t dress my daughter in pink when she was young and I don’t own much pink stuff because as an independent woman I never wanted a color to determine anything about me. It is amazing, though, how pink has come to be one of the strongest, if not the strongest, brand recognized colors in the world.

Pink says 'breast cancer' regardless of the design of the logo, or ribbon, or association it’s attached to. While no one group or business owns ‘pink’, I’ve come to realize that every woman on the planet actually owns pink and my visceral response to the pink blackberry case was simply, sisterhood. I wanted to say ‘hello’, I wanted to say ‘you go girl’, I wanted to say ‘pink unite’ because that’s what a spot of pink does to my senses these days. Who said color isn’t powerful?

~Jo-Anne