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Blue Sky
Wed Apr 27, 2005
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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