When I was a child I colored. I also painted and cut paper and glued and pasted and sometimes taped it together into creations. They were ephemerals, and I've always been since those days the fan but never the artist. I love crayons and colors and hues and intensities and color names and blending and the tactile nature of doing it on paper or whatever -- experiment!. The smell of Crayola crayons is important to my childhood, right up there with pine needles and beach air and low tide and fish parts drying on docks and wood fires. And it's still there, folks. Some visitor asked during my recent visit to the Crayola Factory (which see further on), "Uhh, where does the smell come from?" And the guy said brightly, "Paraffin wax and pigment!" and most of the people were satisfied and went on the the next question. I still don't know where the smell comes from (or maybe how).
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I could write every day about crayons. I could have entries for at least a month. They would be alt of fun for me to write, and they would quickly get very boring for my faithful reader(s). But I'll do it anyway, because I like to. Better formatting than handwriting.
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The song "64 Different Brilliant Colors" is a brilliant and colorful song with shades and shadows, performed by a pair of young women a decade or two ago. My copy of the original album is on tape.
If you feel like coloring and have a printer nearby, here's a real gem. It gives me a frisson from my childhood, when we could buy a coloring book and if we wanted to duplicate a picture we could trace it with tracing paper (probably produced by Crayola, oh yeah!).
June 24
Nativity of St. John the Baptist~~Midsummer Day
For one week now the length of the days has been 14 hrs. 24 mins., the longest days of 2008. But the sun will continue to set at its latest until July 6, so Tater says, Stretch, breathe, watch the bees and enjoy midsummer.
From William Cullen Bryant:
Go forth under the open sky/And list to nature's teachings.
Or observe from your back porch. Tater's Quick Quiz: What do you see in both of these pictures? Look closely.
Jupiter is appearing earlier at night, and the hot humid weather of earlier in the month have gone away, and the days are sunny and showery and nights are cool.
"Perhaps you have felt [the truth of your essential goodness] on some rare day in early summer, when you have been alone in a wood on a blue-bell carpet, and your eyes, wandering to the hedge-wall, have seen it white with may; all around you there has been a silence--a silence that strikes like a blow; and suddenly it ceases to be silence for the birds are singing, and you wonder how long that music has been there without your noticing it. You are right away from the world...."
Ernest Raymond, Through Literature to Life: an Enthusiasm and an Anthology, 1928
Tater will work on his crossword puzzle now, while Star Cat 
watches for jays.
In Oregon salmon are everywhere. At the Bonneville Dam and the zoo and the airport, in murals and polished granite floor mosaics, bronze fish leap and live salmon swim up ladders and rivers. Children and adults in Portland and the region are reminded in public spaces by murals, mosaics, sculpture, viewing places, friendly interpreters of the natural world in which we humans still live despite our sometime attempts to pave it all over or rush by.
