The Color Blue

It's funny how those odd bits and pieces lodge themselves in some crevass in your brain, only to show up later in some entirely different form. When I was a child, my favorite color was blue. Not the sort of startling thing I would expect to turn into anything that matters later in my life.

But it has. Spread out like jigsaw pieces waiting to be noticed as having a pattern. The color blue is embedded in my present life.

There is the blue of New Mexico's sky, one of the few places in my traveling life where I return. Once when I was there, I struck up a conversation with a woman painting at an easel. I asked where she was from. Florida she said. I then asked her why she came all the way to New Mexico to paint. Her reply was that it was the particular blue of the sky, so different from Florida's blue sky.

Hmmm. I hadn't noticed. But she was right. Most of New Mexico is over a mile high, some parts a mile and a half above sea level. The air is thinner - and the sky is dramatically more blue. Just like the blue sky on the images on my earlier blog of Snows and Blues. (No photoshopping and the kind of film here - it is what my digital camera "saw.")

Salinas National Monument

And there is the blue ice of the glaciers that so intrigue me. Alaska's tidewater glaciers slowly traveling into the sea. 



Alaska

And there were those icebergs in Greenland, pieces of glaciers that have broken loose to flow toward open water.

It's bigger than it looks!
Iceberg in Greenland

And at the other end of South America, there is the remoteness of Chile's Avenue Glaciers.   

Glacier melt in Chile

Or perhaps blue continues to capture my attention because it is the color of my dear love's eyes.

Taking a snooze in the sun while waiting for the next glacier 

Now that I have begun thinking about those pieces of blue scattered throughout my life, I imagine I shall find many more!