Color my world

In and of itself, Houston isn't very colorful, mostly the bland of concrete, green in the landscaping and parks of course, and color in the building materials and paint. But it's not necessarily a canvas on which nature paints. So the first thing that I notice when I'm away from home is the colors around me.

Here, the world around me is drenched in color. There are unbroken miles and miles of green, dotted with flower patches of yellow and lavender. Last night's sunset went from crimson to stripes of salmon and violet. The mountains in the distance shifted from green to a dark purple to grey. The night was black and deeper than the distance. Not a light to be seen but for what was inside the house.

This morning, the mountains soaked up the rising sun and seemed to glow beneath a rose and coral sky. I sat on the back porch, with a hundred birch trees behind me and the valley that is the yard before me, and the mountains beyond that. Birds of blue, red, and yellow and black were all around me, singing and twittering, chasing each other from the bird feeder perches and low slung branches. Busy, they were. But not me. I sat in the big Adirondack chair that Troy made, and relished the breeze on my face. Not a sound but that breeze in the leaves, and the birds and chipmunks. This, this is nature's canvas. And it's well painted.