I grew up in Ohio and lived there for over 20 years. In kindergarten I learned my alphabet and my colors. I thought I knew the color green.
When I was five, Kermit the Frog was what Crayola might call Puppet Green.
When I was 10, my dad took me to see the Cleveland Indians play. The field at the old Lakefront Stadium was Baseball Green.
When I was 18, I lived in a dormitory at The Ohio State University. On weekends in Columbus my roommates would go out on High Street and drink beer till they passed out. They came back to the dorm looking Sickly Green.
Still, it wasn’t until I moved to the Pacific Northwest that I encountered Knock Your Socks Off Green. While my relatives in Ohio yesterday dealt with a temperature of four above zero, it was about 45 degrees and raining here in the Puget Sound region. It’s been raining on-and-off since November, and it will continue to rain through early July. Water--the drip-drip of it in our forests, and the rush of it in the surf along our coastline--is as much a part of our lives here as breathing.
Chlorophyll--the thing that makes plants green--is one very happy camper here where I live. I went hiking yesterday in the Olympic National Forest, about 35 minutes from my house. Though the Olympic Mountains towered above me and are buried in deep snow, the lowland forest where I walked was amazingly green, and (with a bit of imagination and wishful thinking on my part) is already beginning to feel spring-like. There are no Photoshop tricks, no pumping up the color saturation at play in the images you see here. You are seeing Nature’s color palate. You are seeing Knock Your Socks Off Green.
