Neighboring emails in my inbox yesterday:

1) This week's BrainFood newsletter from Shane Parrish, which included in its "5 For the Weekend," a fascinating article (even though it's full of chemistry) in Bloomberg about "The Quest for the Next Billion-Dollar Color." It's really about the millenia-long search for a stable and not-poisonous true red but, in the meantime, is the story of a material sciences professor's accidental discovery of a stable and intense beautiful blue, called YInMN. The first new blue pigment created in 200 years!

Perhaps inspired by the same article but maybe not, and in any case serendipitously appearing right next door in my inbox, was 2) "Two Hundred Years of Blue," Maria Popova's latest Brain Pickings digest. This week's posting consists of carefully chosen excerpts of "Cerulean splendor from Goethe, Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Rachel Carson, Toni Morrison, and other literary masters." A long, dreamy, beautiful "...dwelling on the color blue and the way our planet’s elemental hue, the most symphonic of the colors, recurs throughout our literature as something larger than a mere chromatic phenomenon — a symbol, a state of being, a foothold to the most lyrical and transcendent heights of the imagination."

Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s cyanometer, circa 1760.

Then this morning, a glimpse of tender blue peeking through shadows and the overcast.

And then this, this too, appeared today:

In Spring

I'm out with the wheelbarrow mixing mulch.
A mockingbird trills in the pine.
Then, from higher, a buzz, and through patches of blue
as the fog burns off, a small plane pulls a banner,
red letters I can't read—
but I do see, over the fence,
a man in a sky-blue shirt walking his dog to the beach.
He says he missed it, will keep an eye out.
Four barrows of mulch around the blueberry bushes,
I'm pulling off gloves, and he's back, beaming.
"It says, I LOVE YOU, MARTHA.
Are you Martha?"

by Rosie King, from Time and Peonies