Colors You Can't Describe or Paint

One Spring many, many years ago when I was just a girl, my family went to see Aunts and Uncles in Texas who lived in cotton country. As we traveled north the rolling hillsides became covered with wildflowers...buttercups, indian paintbrushes, and of course bluebonnets. At Uncle Dallas' farm all the cousins went to a bluebonnet covered hillside to play. The girls gathered bouquets for a while but the boys seem to be having so much fun rolling down the hill that we joined them. I can still remember the pungent smell of the crushed bluebonnets. By the time we returned to the farmhouse all our clothes were stained green. I don't know if or how my Mother ever got those clothes clean or how we ever got clean that night with buckets of water from the well. The smells, the warmth of the sun and the fun with the cousins stick in my memory like it was yesterday. Bluebonnets always bring back that day.

I'm not the only one in Texas who loves bluebonnets. It is the State flower. In the Spring you can check out wildflower reports from around the State. Texas doesn't cut the roadsides until the wildflowers have had time to go to seed. On the weekends lots of people drive outside the cities until they can find a field of wildflowers, but mostly bluebonnets, and there they plop the children down in a sea of blue and take pictures.

Texas artist love to paint fields of bluebonnets usually with a big oak tree sitting a little off center in the field. But I'll tell you something, some of them are so God awful because the blue of the bluebonnets just can't exactly be reproduced in paint. Some painters come pretty close but most just miss the mark enough that it is jarring.

I miss seeing the wildflowers in the Spring in Texas but I have the Jacaranda tree here in San Miguel. They are in bloom now and you can see them from our terrace like beautiful purple splotches across the town. But their color is another one that I think would be hard to reproduce on canvas.