Living Blues

The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning is CERULEAN BAY

Since we lack oceans here on the prairies, we pretty much lack bays, too. We make do quite nicely with our lakes and rivers, though, and a larger lake may have a small dip in the shoreline one might call a bay. And you’ll find some small crescent (in England a “close”) in the city dubbed Xxx Bay.

We don’t lack shades of blue, though. Saskatchewan bills itself as “the land of living skies” because we have a whole palette of blues and grays with white added in streaks, layers and mounds.

At times I’ve read books that involve an ocean voyage, where the writer talks of a water spout. Narrow tubes of water going up from the sea into the heavens — I’d love to see one of those!

We have a similar phenomenon on the prairie: we call them dust devils. Mini tornadoes, sometimes only a metre wide, sometimes two. They skip over the ground in an erratic path, picking up and swirling dust and leaves. You may be looking at a field of grain and see heads start to swirl in a random path that zips through the grain — and you know a dust devil has touched down.

I like colour descriptions as a rule. However, when novel writers describe the hero or heroine as having cerulean blue eyes, to me this sounds poetic. We just don’t think or talk that way. After all, when was the last time your friend told you so-and-so’s eyes are “cerulean blue”? We may say bright blue, dark blue, gray-blue, maybe even denim blue. But when writers get into really creative shades of eye colour like mocha espresso, cottonseed brown, or tea leaf green, this is unnecessary exaggeration, in my opinion.

I googled CERULEAN and find it’s a cross between aqua and turquoise. There’s some variety. I borrowed these paint chips from the SICO website; neither are named Cerulean, but are about the right colour.