green – The Hermits' Rest

I Can Have a Theme if I Want To

The freedom is getting to me. I may have mentioned that I randomly decided to have a color theme for each month this year. January was black. I was pretty sad that month. The rest of the year is more cheerful, with pink February and purple March.

I had written orange down for April, but all last month I was planning for green. So I switched to green for April. Because I’m my own boss! Yes! I just wish I paid me more.

But not just nails, oh no! It’s hair, too. I’ve never had green hair before. It’s, um, green all right.

I will wear a lot of green, but I’m not gonna go nuts. Just some touches for whimsy. I just need fun right now to keep me going. This doesn’t cost much and I no longer care what people think about how I look (not that I ever did).

I indulged myself today by taking all the time I needed to tally up the birds I saw in March. I have a spreadsheet, you know. I keep track of birds I see at the Hermits’ Rest, elsewhere in Texas, and other states I visit. I share the findings for each month on the blog, too. You can see for yourself what the 84 birds here in March were. You can also see last year, too. I discovered that the only other time Merlin heard a Short-eared Owl was last March. This information alone spurs me on to make it until March 2026!

I really should see them in winter. Maybe they’re migrating in March. Photo from Pexels.

Speaking of green stuff and our ranch, the whole property other than pastures was mowed and trimmed today. It looks very neat. They accidentally mowed the wildflowers on the roadside, which made me sad. Maybe some flowers will come back. The wildflower strip that’s not mowed still looks pretty ragged, so we may just need to try again next year.

There’s good news, though. They moved the round pen to the little field in front of the house, so I’ll have a lot more space for horse training equipment. I can have a gate to practice on, my own cowboy curtain, etc.! Note that, as set up, the round pen is sort of a trapezoid. We will fix it.

I introduced Apache to the new location today. The goal was to just get him over there, but we made it in and did some circles and figure eights. He was not thrilled, but I handled it fine. Then we went back and trotted in the circle-ish area where the pen used to be. He’s such a creature of habit. He still balks at the higher jump. It’s okay.

No photos of the horse today, but, look! I have a blurry photo to show the Northern Harrier does exist here!

What’s the point of all this babbling? I want to encourage you to go and find your fun and indulge in what you love. It’s more important now than ever. The joy we can bring to ourselves is ours and ours alone. I’m not going to let my right to do silly things get taken away, because these little things strengthen me to keep fighting for my rights and the rights of people I care about. I think that’s true for us all.

I declare April to be not only the cruelest month, but also the greenest. So mote it be.

Book Report: Green: The History of a Color

This is the fourth book in the series of books by Michel Pastoureau that detail how colors have been perceived and used through European history that I’ve read. It’s convenient that I was reading this along with the Greenlights book, which has all the green print and green pages. I find the color series really interesting and entertaining, so if you like colors, check out Green: The History of a Color. A lot of what I learned surprised me.

Jane Fonda is smokin’ on the cover, in more ways than one.

You do begin to feel sorry for green, like you did poor yellow in the book I read most recently. It really didn’t get much mention in historical texts, and wasn’t even used in paintings for a long time. One reason was that it has always been difficult to get a green dye that wasn’t made of copper or arsenic or some other poisonous substance. The safe ones were pretty dull. Another was that people just didn’t divide things into colors the way we do now, so a lot of what we would call green was blue or brown to the eyes of people in the past.

Then, poor ole green had a bad reputation of being a color of evil, deceit, and treachery (green knights were never up to any good), unless they were very young men, who were “green” in the untested sense. As time went on, it came to symbolize young love (not necessarily faithful love), peace, and fairy folk.

Apparently, saucy horses wore a lot of green. I love the fact on that horse.

People just didn’t like to wear it, other than a few brief fads where various rulers decided green was their color. Then the sickness came…apparently from covering walls with paint and wallpaper that was green. Some even think that’s what actually got Napoleon.

Green and nature do go hand in hand, though, so there is a lot of green in landscapes and such. A lot of it wasn’t very stable, though, so some landscapes that look brown were once green. And natural objects like the sky, sea, lakes, and rivers were often painted green, not blue. I found that interesting.

Etchings on green paper were popular. I just like this dude’s fuzzy hat.

Since this book dealt primarily with European history, Pastoureau didn’t bring up the color green in other parts of the world. From my studies, I know that Japanese didn’t have a word for green for a long time; aoi meant both blue and green. And the number of colors languages distinguish vary from three to dozens. It just depends on what’s important in a society. For Europeans, Pastoureau notes that texture and other tactile features were more important than color in describing objects (also, apparently in the Middle East when people were writing Biblical passages), which I found pretty interesting.

In addition to all the history stuff, the illustrations in the Green book are just as gorgeous as in the others in the series. These are majorly great coffee-table books (in fact, mine are on the coffee table!) and they are just fun to page through.

Your friends will be green with envy if you display this one, with that fine smoking Jane Fonda on the cover!

Green and Greener: A Photo Essay

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, the day when those of us with Irish ancestors (or Irish children or both) celebrate their heritage. This day always coincides with the part of the Texas spring when it’s so green that it almost hurts your eyes.

Each year I try to burn the spring green into my brain, to carry me through parched brown summers.

So, yesterday, when the late afternoon light was especially suited to enhancing the green of spring, I took many photos. Some were interesting. Others breathtaking. I hope you enjoy the Hermits’ Rest at its greenest.