BLUE - BUT DIFFERENT

I've blogged about blue – but it was a post of a different color. Now I take up the color blue.  We’re almost to the end of the visible spectrum, having covered red, orange, yellow and green. Just blue, maybe indigo, and violet to finish.

Blue skies, and deep blue seas – the first things we come up with when asked about blue. Frank and I have a personal reference to the deepest blue sky we’ve ever seen – we call it Honningsvåg Blue. This is the blue of the northern Norwegian town we visited on a cold, sunny day many years ago. Four of us, we two and our British friends, stood there and marveled at the colour of the sky. (The u in colour for the British!)

A page from our album

Blue has been in my decorating repertoire for many, many years. Blue is serene, and to me, the best color for a bedroom. Ours is basically blue.

There are few blue foods other than blueberries, and they’re really purple, so I don’t care for a blue kitchen. Blue is great in a bathroom too. Though the rooms are now done around green, shaking up my household palette, I had a blue living room and dining room for fifteen years.

Blue runs the gamut from green-blue to blue-violet. Remember all those blues in the box of Crayolas? (Holey Socks! On a whim, I googled Crayola Blue. Crayola has pages where you can explore all their colors.) Alice blue, baby blue, robin’s egg blue, Carolina blue, China blue, blue jeans and blue meanies: there are many names for blue, from aquamarine and ultramarine through lapis lazuli (don’t you just love to say lapis lazuli?) and navy, to periwinkle and lavender blue (dilly, dilly). (Silly, Silly!)

Tumbled lapis lazuli

Blue has always been a popular color for uniforms, military and constabulary. The men in blue are the ones to look for when trouble brews. In tropical climes however, the policemen’s blue gives way to white. Good thinking. We once saw a policeman sweltering in his blue uniform while walking the area around the Gay Head Lighthouse on Martha’s Vineyard on a very hot 5^th of July. Whites, even khaki, were what he should have been wearing.

Wikipedia says, and I add my bit in []’s: “Surveys in the U.S. and Europe show that blue is the color most commonly associated with harmony [Rhapsody in Blue?], faithfulness [true blue], confidence [those men in blue], distance [into the wild blue yonder], infinity [∞], the imagination [out of the blue], cold [that Honningsvåg sky, and don’t forget that the hot and cold faucets are often labeled in red and blue], and sometimes with sadness [to be musical again, Am I Blue?]. In U.S. and European public opinion polls it is overwhelmingly the most popular colour, chosen by almost half of both men and women as their favourite colour.” [See that?!]

If you are ever plagued by the blue meanies, go to Wikipedia and read all about blue.