L'aura del Campo

The last time I shook your hand, ao, grue

SPRING: 16 Jamál (13 May)

          Ao          

Weather where I am: 62º.

Weather in Greece, NY: 64º.

Weather in Thessoloniki, Greece: 21ºC.

The last time I shook your hand

Some days stand out for joy, some for grief. In thinking of a friend today, I will write in my journal, "The last time I shook your hand was three years ago today." This may not seem much, but it is very difficult to feel cut off from those I've known and love. No contact or word is sheer hell in a couple cases (a blessing in other cases). E-mail isn't enough. Phone calls help. But for some, anything less than actually being able to see, hear and touch (even a handshake) will not assuage the sense of loss.

Greece

Greece, New York is a suburb of Rochester. My friends, the Woosters live in the area as well as WDC members obwan and sentimente. Both have great photos of the greenery and landscape of the area.

Greece, on the other hand is the present abode of our dear Sarah, zwisis.

Yesterday, she wrote about sitting in Lagada and seeing this list of things:

green field; red poppies; yellow and white flowers of weeds; blue skies; white clouds; rolling fields; silky grass; bright sunshine; little white dog with a jewelled collar; man smoking cigar.

Well! You cannot just give me a list of prompts and expect me to ignore it! And I have to write everyday to meet my goals, so, I sketched and edited:

In Lagada, la vita


Yanni takes her to check out the Citroen, a time to practice patience, a way of life for Greeks: but Zimbabwe born, she fidgets in her seat. She looks out, sees the flowers blooming mauve and red, yellow, white. Looking up, it's obvious the clouds are somewhere bound. She jots down these images she's found.

So, what to do but write a verse or two? Time is free; it's cars that cost.

The moment of the poppy's bloom is therefore never lost, recorded as the little dog and wildflowers toss their heads. She dreams instead of fussing.

This view of Spring brings to mind the green of native land, as time bends to touch itself, brings forth the sap from wounds not healed. From thistles that prick these scars she picks at scabs.

When the old man lights his brown cigar, the tendrils make their way to her. The white dog shakes its jewelled collar. Red poppies grasp the brilliant sunshine, let it go. Time is spent not wasted here. Here, where it stretches like a Dali clock, where one Yanni is not quite like another, where lepta become drachma become euros and the car is paid for.

She ponders: how many lepta would it have cost her once to water her donkey, grab some feta, and wander home? How many clouds would have passed above her while she rode? How many widflowers would she have picked and gathered along the path to home, to the Village of the Bees, Melissohori?

Lost in thoughts in Lagada, Yanni drives her past the white and yellow weeds that sprinkle the rolled out carpets of green where mauve thistles thrive, caress the silky grass, bring back the past. The present stretches across blue sky to reach the grasslands of her Africa. Above the white clouds of Lagada, she has found herself. [163.111]

So I made this a separate item that can be reviewed: "In Lagada, la vita"  [ASR]

I went looking at licence plates yestereve. This is what I found in a couple hours:

Rhode Island; Virginia; Minnesota; Arkansas; Texas; Missouri; Washington; Nebraska; Colorado; Oklahoma; North Dakota; New Mexico; Georgia; Illinois; Wyoming; Menominee (WI); Arizona; New Jersey; Michigan; Iowa; Wisconsin, Kiowa (OK), FLorida.

I spoke to Gina Cole (in the Kiowa car). She knows people I know in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Kelly Anquoe, of course! But others as well. Memories of Tahlequah make me long to revisit the land "Where the Red Fern Grows".

IMAGES

Hear the flap of the flags above Fraser. Blue sage grows near the base of the Cornplanter's shovel. The staute stays when we move on.

Red quince flowers. An elderly couple in a blue Miata. A tee-shirt I covet: "I scare my own family".

Today my discussion will cove the color concept of 'grue' and the Japanese color Ao, but first what the word AO can also mean (from Wikipedia).

AO may stand for:

* Adults Only, contents rated not suitable for people under 18 by Entertainment Software Rating Board
* Auxiliary oiler, US Navy hull classification symbol
* Anarchy Online, a science fiction Massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing game
* Angola, 2-letter ISO and obsolete NATO country code
* Aosta Valley (Vallée d'Aoste, Valle d'Aosta), abbreviation for the region and province of Italy
* Arctic oscillation
* Atlas Orthogonal
* Australian Airlines, IATA code
* Officer of the Order of Australia, postnominal letters
* The nickname of a street basketball player named Aaron Owens.
* The nickname of Capitals winger Alexander Ovechkin.

In addition:

* "Ao" is a Japanese word meaning both 'blue' and 'green'.
* Ao - the people of north east India
* Ao - Tibeto-Burman language of the Ao people
* Ao - the Polynesian god
* Lord Ao - Fictional god in Dungeons & Dragons.

Ao

Ao is a Japanese word including what Westerners would call, separately, blue and green. For example, in Japan, green traffic lights are described as ao shingo, and blue skies are described as ao zora, as in aozora bunko. Ao also appears in the name of Aomori Prefecture.

In writing, ao appears in Japanese as あお in hiragana and 青 in kanji. As an adjective, it becomes aoi (青い, aoi?)

The color ao can also indicate youth, as in the song aoi kajitsu (a song about a young girl) by singer Momoe Yamaguchi, a meaning that stems from the on'yomi (Chinese-based reading) sei of the kanji for ao. Yamaguchi's biography about her youth was called aoi toki (my young days). Fresh fruit in Japan is sometimes written seika (青果, seika?).

Japanese also has a separate native word for green, midori. Midori can be a woman's name as in Midori Ito.

Other meanings

The word Aoi can also mean a hollyhock. In writing, this form of "aoi" appears in Japanese as hiragana あおい , or あふひ in historical kana usage, and kanji 葵.

GRUE: BLUE or GREEN

Distinguishing "blue" from "green" in language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The English language makes a distinction between blue and green, but some languages, such as Vietnamese or Tarahumara usually do not use separate words for green and refer to that colour using a word that can also refer to yellow or to blue. In Vietnamese, blue and green are denoted by xanh; blue is specifically described as "xanh like the sky" and green as "xanh like the leaves".

Modern Japanese has words for both green (緑 midori) and blue (青い aoi adj.; 青 ao n.), although the boundaries are not the same as in English. Ancient Japanese did not have this distinction: the word midori only came into use in the Heian period, and at that time (and for a long time thereafter) midori was still considered a shade of ao. Educational materials distinguishing green and blue only came into use after World War II, during the Occupation: thus, even though most Japanese consider them to be green, the word ao is still used to describe certain vegetables, apples and vegetation. Ao is also the name for the color of a traffic light, "green" in English. However, most other objects — a green car, a green sweater, and so forth — will generally be called midori. Japanese people also sometimes use the English word "green" for colors. The language also has several other words meaning specific shades of green and blue.

Welsh has different boundaries than English regarding blue and green. The word glas is usually translated as 'blue'. It can also refer, variously, to the colour of the sea, of grass, or of silver. The word gwyrdd is the standard translation for 'green'. Glas (same spelling) is, comparably, the translation for "green" in Irish, with specific reference to plant hues of green; other shades would be referred to as uaine. In Irish, gorm is the word for "blue" – the first part (gor(m)) pronounced as in the Welsh gwyr(dd).

The modern Chinese language has the blue-green distinction; however, another word which predates the modern vernacular, qīng (青), is also used. It can refer to either blue or green, or even (though much less frequently) to black, as in xuánqīng (玄青). For example, the Flag of the Republic of China is today still referred to as qīng tiān, bái rì, mǎn dì hóng ("Blue Sky, White Sun, Whole Field Red"); whereas qīng cài is the Chinese word for "green vegetable".

In Kurdish the word "şîn" (pronounced sheen), meaning "blue", is used for green things in nature like leaves, grass, and eyes. However, there is another word, "kesk", which is used for other green things, for instance in the Kurdish flag.

Pashto uses the same word 'sheen' as in Kurdish to denote blue as well as green. 'Shinkay', a word derived from 'sheen' means greenry but 'sheen asman' means blue sky. When there is ambiguity, one is prone to ask, "'sheen' as sky?" or "'sheen' as plants?".

The link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_%22blue%22_from_%22green%22_in_langu...