Every evening, just as it’s getting dark, Dave tucks Celie hen under his arm and carries her down to the barn. The other hens are already at roost on their perch below the window. The barn fan roars and they whistle and hum, shifting on their perch and panting with open beaks. Celie trills quietly, one gold eye fixed on her protector as he shuts the coop door.

I can’t explain why it is some animals immediately find a place in your heart. It just happens sometimes. Old Lilly goat, our donkey Tru, and Celie the hen - they have something about them, maybe the way they hold you with their gaze, an openness to their presence, a way of bringing you into the moment with them. Stop a moment with me, they seem to say, looking into your eyes.

Grandma always planted “Heavenly Blue” morning glories. In her later years, my mom or my sister or I would be delegated to plant out the precious seeds. Then there was the week or two of waiting to see if they would sprout - Grandma calling to despair that she wouldn’t have her heavenly blues this year - and then the relief when they did, eventually, come up. I’m not sure how they came to be so significant to her, there is no story of her mother or grandmother always keeping them. Perhaps it was the nothing more than the ritual of it. Procuring the seed each spring, delegating one of the family to plant them below the special trellis, waiting for them to germinate, and then making sure they were watered and cared for until they flowered in August and September, her birth month.

The other day Nettie wanted to paint and as I was squeezing the paints out for her, I found myself saying “Do you want some blue for the sky?” A silly thing to ask, really, since I had no idea what she was going to paint, and whether or not a sky was involved, much less if she wanted it to be blue. But we’re conditioned, aren’t we? Even though I regularly create and make art, I still fall into the trap of seeing and presenting the world a certain way: blue sky, white clouds, green grass…as if that was the only experience of everything nature does, as if that was all the world held for anyone.

Why is the sky blue? Nettie’s asked me this lots of times. My answer is amorphous. I know it has to do with the atmosphere, the gasses somehow reflect blue. We learn the real answer this month from her Highlights magazine, which says that when the sun’s light strikes nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the atmosphere, blue light is scattered, but violet light is scattered even more - so the sky should look violet, all things being equal. Of course things aren’t - equal, that is - our eyes can’t see violet light as well as blue - so perhaps the sky IS violet and our human eyes simply aren’t able to recognize it that way.

Chicken’s eyes are tetrachromatic - they have four cones that allow them to see red, blue, green, and ultraviolet light - meaning they can see many more colors and shades of colors than humans can. Is Celie’s sky violet? I hope it might be.