Sky-blue-pink, my granddad said as we looked at the sky. That’s what I call it. We stood at the edge of a sandpit, ready for a morning of fishing. Or rock-skipping, frog-scaring, and snail-hunting, for which my sisters and I were much better suited. In the sanctuary of sky-blue-pink, however, you can cast twenty times, lose twenty crawdads, and your granddad still smiles and baits your hook again.

At dawn, the night dissolves into a mottled mixture of lavender and gray at the tree line, and then lightens into ribbons of rose and cerulean. This is the sanctuary of sky-blue-pink. It brings with it promise. Promise of a new day, new challenges and risks, new gifts and blessings.

As I walk at dawn, there are moments during which I feel suspended in time, the day momentarily delayed, and the sanctuary of sky-blue-pink envelops me. It takes me back to pre-dawn moments, an empty bottle on the end table beside me and the colors of dawn sliding through the window before me. Having risen in the dark for an early feeding, I hold my babies snuggly against my chest, their pink baby hands, curled like sleeping snails and nestled in the hollows beneath my shoulder blades. When you hold a sleeping baby, time stands still. There is nothing else you can do but give into the rhythmic breath of sleep, and there is nowhere else you would rather be.

I remember this sky-blue-pink feeling wash utterly through me. And I recall fearing that I may, someday, forget these moments and how these pigments of love’s colors are particularly lovely when your arms are wrapped around a baby at daybreak.

The sanctuary of sky-blue-pink is a watercolor sanctuary. Oils and acrylic paints, in all their opaqueness, have no place here. This is a place for fluid sweeps that saturate the sky and then run into the horizon leaving translucent pools of new color, one hue dissolving into another and then another. This is a place where less is more.

In her poem, “One or Two Things,” Mary Oliver writes:

For years and years I struggled                                                                                             just to love my life. And then

the butterfly                                                                                                                                     rose, weightless, in the wind.

“Don’t love your life                                                                                                                   too much,” it said,

and vanished                                                                                                                             into the world.

Mary Oliver understands the weightless nature of the sanctuary of sky-blue-pink, how it cannot be held or bound, how you cannot love it too much. Less is more. You love it for its brevity and beauty. You love it when it vanishes and even more when it returns.

My granddad was not really a man of words, and yet he got it so right with sky-blue-pink. Fifty some years later, this sanctuary is just as good as it was when I was dipping my hand into the crawdad bucket, the promise of a morning at the water’s edge, and the Nebraska sky awash with sky-blue-pink.