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Blue Sky
Fri Apr 04, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
"Why is the sky blue?" Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook and that's a question
that many of us asked when we were young. But for commentator Gemma Rendell, the question was
shaded a bit differently.
I was probably about six, I loved to color - you know, keeping in the lines, choose any color,
give people purple ears if you felt like it. Except that when my mother asked me why I never
finished the page - why hadn't I "done " the sky, I can recall a true sense of bewilderment,
absolute bewilderment. What was she talking about ... It was just "there", nobody colors the
sky. Why would you color the sky? Anyway, how could you? It was just there, just a white
ceiling, or grey, and I didn't have a grey crayon. (There was one called sky blue -- which had
always puzzled me.) But what strikes me now is that it truly just did not occur to me that the
sky could be any color, ever. Sunsets and sunrise? In the north of England -- what were they?
So, I do remember looking at the sky a lot after that -- and I particularly remember driving
in the summer to Dorset and thinking "Wow!" they have blue sky down here, wouldn't this be a
nice place to live!" and I remember thinking to myself at the time that my mother had been
telling the truth; there really is blue behind the clouds, and that the clouds really could be
separate, and white! And I think of that revelation so often now and the fact that that shock
of the truth left me with a real love of the sky.
The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported
generously by Subaru of America.
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