The Sky

In a few weeks time we will say farewell to a year of Californian blue sky. It’s as though you could walk into a paint shop and pluck that exact colour off the shelf. It’s been practically unchanging all year – apart from at sunrise, sunset and night-time.

Having grown up in England, followed by seventeen years of living in Wellington, New Zealand, this constant blue took some getting used to! It took me a few months to quiet my mouth, on opening the curtains every morning, from saying, ‘Oh, it’s another simply beautiful day!’.

It’s the kind of blue I yearn to see after a dreary winter in England. It’s the kind of calm I yearn for, after a particularly windy few weeks in Wellington, New Zealand (where the clouds can move so fast that watching them leaves me in a hallucinatory mood – cue ‘Keep Calm and Call Doctor Who’).

It’s a blue I’ll miss from time to time, but it’s not my kind of blue (I’m more of a ride in the Tardis through whatever the elements throw at me kind of blue).

What I shall miss the most about the sky here, is that it’s at least in the same hemisphere as people I hold very close to my heart. It’s felt good to see in the seasons (all be it, they haven’t been very pronounced – just a change in daylight hours) along with my dear folks and friends in England.

I now return to the opposite side of the world, where as the evenings get lighter for the northern hemisphere – so they get darker for the northern hemisphere – and my heart feels somewhat more strung out in those extra miles of separation.

Skype calls from daybreak in New Zealand will always be met with the fall of night in England; and calls from England in their morning hours will be met by a curtain of darkness in New Zealand. The sky will rarely be blue for us at the same time.

I shall take a piece of Californian blue away with me in my heart and think on it as the blue in the middle, of where my heart pulls in two.

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