Green vs Yellow, faint green and brown

When my mother-in-law visited the state that I've lived in for over 20 years, almost 30, she really had nothing good to say about it. She didn't like the lack of trees. She thought it was all very boring. Esther had lived in New Jersey most of her life. She liked the tall trees and the green grass. Esther liked gardening, too.

Well, I must confess that I don't like gardening. I despise house plants, and I like living in this semi-arid state. My parents come from back East and we would make these yearly trips to go visit grandparents. Once we crossed the Mississippi river the land would start getting lush. Even as we approached the Mississippi the land was getting lush. Looking out the windows all you could see was green. Green trees. Green grass. Green plants. Green. Green. Green. All that green was oppressive. As we travelled further East things closed in around us. We went through forests and the trees made canopies over our heads.

Then we got into Pittsburgh. Hills after hills sprouted up all around us. On the hills were buildings and houses perched on the edges. Everywhere you wanted to go was UP. To get to my grandfather's house you had to go up the hill. A very steep hill that my mother remembers riding sleighs down in the winter. My grandmother's house was right at the end of one hill. We went down that hill to get to the house. We only came from one direction only because the other direction the hill is so steep that our cars could never make it up the incline, and I can't imagine what the down hill ride might have been like. My father said that in the winter they would ride their sleighs down that hill and would have enough momentum to go half way up the next hill. They would ride the sleigh like a pendulum until the initial force had subsided.

Now this all sounds like great fun but we're talking about winter. We were always there in the summer. No matter when we went-- early Spring, early Summer, middle of Summer; late Summer-- there was always something green. No, wait, I mean everything was green. There was no variation to peoples yards. Here where I live things start changing in July. We always are in drought situations in the summer. We can always count on the grass to fade to a yellowish green. True there are those folks who spit on the waterring banns and their yards are that "beautiful green color". But I look at those yards and think how foolish and wasteful they are.

Today while I walked across campus to pick up Miss Independence I noticed the nice crunching noise under my feet. I started looking at the grass/weeds very closely. It was amazing. Some areas were a very pale yellow color; other places the grass was plain yellow, and as you got closer to the streets and sidewalks the grass got a little green around the edges. So much variation. So very interesting.

Oh, I do want to refute one impression my mother-in-law had of my state. We do have trees. Okay, they don't soar up to the sky; although, some cottonwood trees do. I think it's pretty amazing that we have trees at all. They may be small but they survive through two drought periods a year and high winds most the year. Amazing.