The Color Green

Our front porch.

I am sitting on my porch, contemplating the color green.

Not only is our house and our balcony furniture and even our car and, gosh, my cellphone case green, but we live in Houston, where the climate is “humid subtropical,” which is a fancy way of saying “swamp.”

From Rick & Mambo,
a California radio show

 

We live two doors down from Joshua’s, a nursery, which, come to think of it, painted its building a startling lime green the day after we put a bid on this house.

If you are going to live near a commercial enterprise – and since we wanted a walkable neighborhood, we were going to – you could do a lot worse than live near a nursery. Joshua’s has beautiful plantings and you can always pop in for a dose of greenery. Being in the woods or garden or a nursery always makes me feel better. Maybe it’s all the oxygen the plants are producing. As Franklin Roosevelt said, “Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”

According to Wikipedia, the word “green” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “grene,” meaning “grow.” It is associated with youth (a greenhorn). You can be given a green light, a good thing. It is the color of environmental causes. It is also the color of jealousy and envy. (Iago called jealousy “the green-ey’d monster” in Othello.) And it's the color of nausea.

I read, here, that green eyes, which I have, are the rarest eye color; only 2% of people have them. I’m not sure I believe this since the same website has a page about violet eyes, and I’m pretty sure violet eyes, if they even exist (do you know anyone with purple eyes?), would be rarer.

And that’s all I got about the color green.