When blue skies make us blue

As much as I enjoy sunshine and warmth, and I do, My Minnesota could use a little less blue skies for awhile and more sky blue water falling from gray skies. Almost all (92%) of the state is experiencing moderate drought, not yet like California, but enough to notice and start to be concerned.

With today's three blue hues, we're more than halfway through our list. I'm starting to see a pattern in which some of the names listed reference the same color under a different name. Unfortunately, the examples of the colors often have a variety of hues and shades. For example, for Indian blue one reference refers us to Indigo and notes Leyden blue is another name for Cobalt. It's too bad Linnaeus never tackled colors. Here's today's triumvirate of blues, which may or may not be three different hues.

• Indian Blue:         Definition     Images
• Leyden Blue:       Definition     Images
• Mountain Blue:    Definition     Images

Today's Poem-a-Day includes the word bluet, the long-leaf variety of which grows in Minnesota. During the past year or so I've been discovering more and more linkages between Minnesota and New England. That pleases me all out of proportion to any practical significance. Instead of oil or tar sands, maybe we need a pipeline from the melting snows on the east coast to California's reservoirs.

looking down toward St. Croix Falls - Taylors Falls

Photo by J. Harrington

The Vantage Point

Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963 

If tired of trees I seek again mankind,
    Well I know where to hie me—in the dawn,
    To a slope where the cattle keep the lawn.
There amid lolling juniper reclined,
Myself unseen, I see in white defined
    Far off the homes of men, and farther still
    The graves of men on an opposing hill,
Living or dead, whichever are to mind.

And if by noon I have too much of these,
    I have but to turn on my arm, and lo,
    The sunburned hillside sets my face aglow,
My breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze,
    I smell the earth, I smell the bruisèd plant,
    I look into the crater of the ant.

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