The day is so picturesque! Cloudless blue sky, bright warm sunshine, and the beautiful greens of the trees and garden plants. My flowers are loving the sun. A faint breeze is blowing, not enough to waken the wind chimes. Perfect for porch sitting and pondering. The only thing interrupting my solitude is a large fat blue tail skink crawling around the porch. So afraid he will climb in my shoe or crawl up my leg. Can’t relax. You know me and my critter magnetism.

The only symphony I hear today to compete with the yard bird symphony is a bark train concert with the dogs up the street. Penelope stood up and is listening but she’s not joining in. I’m noticing all the pretty colors with the plants around my porch. The sun is shining right on their blooms and brightens all the different shades. So many reds and blues and purples and oranges and yellows. The fern is leafing out from last year and the new fronds are the prettiest shades of green.

Color is such a vital part of our world and our landscape. Colors affect our feelings and add richness and definition to our lives. Even memories and certain thoughts can be influenced by certain colors. Research says red and green are the colors we notice first. Never thought much about how colors affect us and what they mean. A box of eight basic crayons includes the colors red, blue, black, green, yellow, orange, purple, and brown. We all know red is for love and passion and I suppose anger, too. When I think of red I see cardinals and full blooming geraniums. On children’s color charts you usually see an apple.

In elementary school we are all given a picture of an apple to color and we all are given a red crayon. Don’t know why because we all see different colors of apples in our minds. An artist I interviewed once for a magazine article said giving a child a red crayon to color an apple is the first step to thwarting their creativity. I see green apples, some see yellow delicious apples, or even the black diamond apple. We all see color differently. “If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue,” — Paul Gauguin

The color orange is used for energy and vitality and shares happiness with the color yellow, which is sometimes used for hope, too. When I see an orange crayon I see a pumpkin and the yellow crayons inspires a sun with long rays in the corner of my drawing. Green, oh, so many colors of green in the spring, so green is for new beginnings and nature. Blue is for calm and sadness. The children’s color chart I looked at had a blue car but I see calm water with the color blue. I don’t see sadness with blue. The color chart pictured a cat for black and a monkey for brown. I see chocolate chip cookies when I think of the color brown and the brown color of good earth for planting vegetables and flowers. I definitely see pansies and petunias when I think of the color purple.

How drab the earth would be without color and all the emotions it invokes. My friend sent me some interesting color words today. I need a dictionary to learn how to pronounce them. Gonna attempt to make sentences with the words and see if you can figure out what I’m describing.

At sunset the sky was glaucous and the aureolin sun colored the sky across the horizon with soft hued lines of heliotrope, smaragdine, zaffre, and phlox. The old oaks and magnolias with their wenge trunks and eburnean blossoms highlighted the landscape that was skobeloff as darkness fell. That is a sentence from a dusty old book!

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way — things I had no words for,” — Georgia O’Keeffe