Living here in the Pacific Northwest, we are simply surrounded by blue and green.  Washington is the Evergreen State for a reason!

Driving down Highway 530 on the way to North Cascades National Park, tall trees line both sides of the road, and the late afternoon light makes them look more than one shade of green.  There are also some deciduous trees mixed in, and they are always lighter in color.  And, once you arrive at the Diablo Lake Overlook, the water below has a very distinctive color, caused by the ground-up rock and ice from the glaciers.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the Ocean blue.

Who doesn’t remember that line from grade school?  In our adulthood, we have “sailed the ocean blue” on cruises, twice.  The most recent one was to Hawaii and back from San Francisco.  Near Hawaii, we saw the Pacific Ocean, in as deep a blue as I had ever seen.  I just gazed at the water, marveling at how very BLUE it was.  You can even see the curvature of the earth on the horizon in this picture.

Nothing in my experience even halfway approached that blue.  Ultramarine?  I think so.

Our other cruise was to Alaska, and we saw some very different blue there.  As we approached the Hubbard Glacier, we noticed that the ice of the glacier was blue.  It wasn’t an optical illusion, the ice really was that blue.

And on the ship itself, there was a swimming pool.  When we got to Ketchikan, Alaska, the outside temperature was in the 70s, and we got a little sunbathing in.  The pool itself was the prettiest shade of blue.

On our trip to the Asian grocery store, there are, of course, lots and lots of different colors of green vegetables, from light to dark green, to yellow-green.  The thoughtful way the store displays them, makes them look especially inviting.

On the shelves, all the cans of various kinds of little fish are, of course, blue!

On our trip to Israel in 2007, I found this door, painted in bright colors with a blue background, and three of the players are dressed in blue and green.  You can’t look at this without smiling, can you?  Except, now that I look at it closer, the guitar player is playing it backwards, like Paul McCartney used to do!  The left hand normally fingers the chords, while the right hand strums!

Our backyard these days is in what I like to call “jungle mode”, with various green plants growing in their profusion.

Finally, I keep coming back to this example of green nature.  This little waterfall near Tumwater Falls is almost achingly green.  I could have stood there and watched it for a long time.

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