JOY ALONG THE WAY: WONDERFUL WORLD OF MANY COLORS

The early cold spring days didn't faze the violets at all. Great intensive blue patches of them dot the yard. Here and there, as if buttoning down the violet patches, are the yellow dandelions. "Well, of course, they're yellow," you might say. But I have a point to make here. Along comes a couple of bright red cardinals to rummage around in the buttoned-down earth carpet and lo! you have a living, although not round, color wheel with the primary colors, red, yellow and blue, in place. Ere the summer is over all the in between blended colors will appear in some form or other and I can't wait.

Brown? Black? Gray? Sure, if they cone, say in the shape of a mottled brown tortoise shell moving across the lawn, a black swallow-tailed butterfly fluttering about or an intricately woven gray spider web, dew diamond.

And to think, if you get dizzy and your head or the earth seem to go round and round at sufficient speed, everything might look white!

I've never heard of this happening, but a long ago art teacher tried to show us that if you spun the color wheel fast enough, making all the colors travel at the same speed, the color wheel would look white.

Having only muscle power to speed the spin of the color wheel, the demonstration never did quite come off for us, but we dutifully read in our art textbook that this would truly be the case. We took it on faith, just as we took the law of gravity on faith, although we couldn't see it. Most of us also took it on faith that, if confessed, our sins could be forgiven although we couldn't see the process with our eyes.

How we did like something we could see, though, such as the centrifugal principle demonstrated. What farm child couldn't swing a bucket full of milk around and around like a wheel, so fast that the milk did not spill, although the bucket would sometimes be upside down. We could eventually have made the cream "rise" to the bottom of the bucket of milk because it would be heavier than the milk, had we the strength.

But, back to the basic primary colors in my yard -- blue violets, yellow dandelions and red cardinals. I don't want my head or the earth to spin so fast that everything turns white. I want to see all the in-between colors. And they will come, either species by species or species of myriad color by species of myriad color. Throw out a handful of mixed zinnia seed in some prepared soil and see what happens, and maybe, just maybe, highly unlikely, a painted bunting will stop at your bird feeder. I've seen only one in my lifetime. But they're out there somewhere.

So here will be my living color wheel this spring and summer. Yours too.

Red -- cardinals, tulips, Paul's Scarlet roses.

Orange -- orioles and cosmos if I sow them. Butterfly weed (not bush).

Yellow -- dandelions, iris, yellow gold finch, jonquils, day lilies, sundrops, bumblebee stripes, butterflies, etc, etc.

Green -- grass, grass and more grass. Also the backs of some hummingbirds and underwing feathers of the flicker, katydids, green garden snake, leaves, leaves and more leaves.

Blue -- larkspurs, iris, violets, hyacinths.

Indigo -- indigo bunting and dark blue iris.

Violet -- lilacs, although they've been frost nipped, hen bit, although a weed.

And just think of all the colors in between. Then some days there will be those gorgeous rainbows in the sky, over which we'd all like to fly.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.