(NOTE: I consider myself a good writer, but good only gets better by practice. So I’ve signed up for the WordPress Everyday Inspiration schedule to prompt me to write something different every day. This is the result of today’s nudge.)

A List of Colors I See Outside My Back Window Right Now: 

  • The many shades of green, ranging from the bright swaths – with a little brown mixed in here and there – of the grass in the morning sunshine to the slightly darker hues that are where the shadows from the increasingly bare cherry tree are falling. Then there’s the deep, dark green that comes from the shadow made by the fence that blocks the morning light. A bush creates a solid clump of green against the wood where it sits in the corner of the fence. And trees around the neighborhood remind me of the moon, with sunlight shining on one side and the other dark, where the sun isn’t falling yet.
  • Two shades of a brown on the house across the way, a light brown, the kind people would describe as a “neutral” color on the siding and the dark brown of the shingles on the roof.
  • Black wrought iron and mesh on the firepit that sits in the middle of my back yard in the middle of a sea of green.
  • A pop of red wood that denotes the back deck of the house across the street, just visible over the top of the fence.
  • The light blue – kind of a greyish blue – of the house with the red wood deck.
  • Two shades of grey, one of the bricks and stones that make up my own back patio, the stones forming two and a half intertwining circles as it extends from the sliding glass doors in back out into the green of the grass. The other of the iron and mesh chairs that make up the hand-me-down patio furniture set that sits on the patio, the chairs rarely used because if we’re going out there as a family we pull out the more comfortable collapsable camping chairs that are stored in the garage and which are brightly colored, each of us with our own.
  • A different sort of blue that’s hard to make out from here on another house visible from here. It’s a darker blue than the other house, a more solid blue, a blue that once upon a time might have reminded someone of the beginnings of the ocean before you get out into the waves but which has faded with time to a much more muted shade.
  • The brown of the fence, dark in some places and almost grey in others as rain, snow and sunshine has changed the face of it, creating streaks and smudges in the planks.