the color blue

When I wake up in the morning, I have an immediate view of the New York City sky. With windows that reach just above the base of my little loft bed, I often feel like a bird perched atop a very high branch. I guess you could say I have an everchanging, framed picture of the weather.

Today the sky is blue. It flows from a saturated deep azure to an almost gray white color as the eye moves toward the horizon; the only clue from my six-floor walk-up that the world is round and not one vast, jagged city.

It makes me think of the blue in the embroidered lady my sister and I bought my mother...

Or maybe even the sweeps of robin's egg blue in Monet's "Sunrise". This painting always seems to conjure up the duality of hardship and hope for me. I wonder about those people in the boats - and how sleepy they must feel.

This color blue reminds me of my favorite crayola crayon. I would choose it everytime I wanted to draw something extremely pretty; like a flower, a rainbow or a stick figure of my cat Tonka.

Timothy Walker uses blue here like a fairy dust or dreamy haze. At the same time it's an opaque back drop, illuminating the kind of fantastical tree house every six year old who believes in leprechauns and mermaids conjures up at least once.

But Dylan Thomas said it best:

"It was high summer, and the boy was lying in the corn. He was happy because he had no work to do and the weather was hot. He heard the corn sway from side to side above him, and the noise of the birds who whistled from the branches of the trees that hid the house. Lying flat on his back, he stared up into the unbrokenly blue sky falling over the edge of the corn. The wind, after the warm rain before noon, smelt of rabbits and cattle. He stretched himself like a cat, and put his arms behind his head. Now he was riding on the sea, swimming through the golden corn waves, gliding along the heavens like a bird..."