FINDING PURPLE AND YELLOW

I went searching for Spring Green last weekend at Pt. Reyes Seashore.

Spring Green is one of my favorite colors. To me, it represents renewal and hope.  But it is a fleeting color. You have to capture it at the right moment as new buds come out in early Spring. I was too late. At the seashore, all I found was a small sprig struggling out from a rocky path. Spring green was already gone from Pt. Reyes. Looking around the path to the sea, I saw an abundance of yellow and purple instead. Isn't that the way of life? You look for one thing and find another!

Yellow waved its head on flowers along the path, but purple appeared in the leaves and under the bushes. Purple, is the color of shadows, the mixing of two strong primary colors, blue and red. Working with my watercolors, I mixed various shades of blues and reds together to find a purple that I liked. Ultramarine Blue and  Quinacridone Red turned out to be my favorite combination. With those two colors, I painted the cloudy sky over the ocean at Pt. Reyes.

Pt. Reyes is on the western side of Marin County. As I drove there on a winding road, I discovered that each point we wanted to reach was just 21 miles away: twenty-one miles from San Rafael to Pt. Reyes Station, the small town near the coast, twenty-one miles to the lighthouse, 21 miles back to Mill Valley.

 

I had booked a cottage at an inn that looked great on their website, but which turned out to be ready for renovation. The musty smell was just bearable for one night. We groaned, "Not another Viking Motel!" (Our family joke about the worst place we have ever stayed.) We asked to be moved, but the inn was full. Instead they transferred us to another place, Tomales Bay Resort.

We arrived at the resort later in the day to find a quiet, light-filled room close to the bay. A pelican skimmed across the water. It was so peaceful that when my husband Bill set up his camera to take a time lapse of the sunrise, he wondered if the noise of the camera clicking would bother the neighbors. We had found a perfect weekend retreat. We had planned for one thing and found another.

We wandered around Pt. Reyes, walked paths to the beach, snapped photos, and sat in the sun for awhile before we headed home refreshed. I didn't see the Spring Green that I was looking for. The early warm weather this year accelerated Spring so that flowers were already blooming all along the shore. That beautiful, fleeting new green had already changed to a more hardy shade of deep green ready for Summer.

 

Check out Pt. Reyes Seashore: http://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/index.htm

Check in to Tomales Bay Resort:  http://www.tomalesbayresort.com