The sunset last night was sky-blue-pink, a phrase that resonates from my childhood.

In a preteen directorial phase, i scampered about, mustering my siblings and neighborhood kids to enact plays. The flagstone patio of our backyard was a stage with a view of the river, the Ohio, in the city of Rising Sun. Across from Rabbit Hash, Kentucky.

The inviting town names, portending stories themselves, may have seeded a love of inventive word play, a logical step beyond reading and playmaking. When the real folk balked I concocted scenarios true, courtesy of Barbie and her dream house on a shelf too high for bountifully cantankerous young ‘uns, my imagination spurred by reading Jack and Jill.

The magazine thrilled me, my own mail! The subscription from my Grandma incited an independence that I burrowed into. Among the plays, I found more word play: Jack and Jill borrowed writings from turn-of-the century – 1900 not 2000 – children’s stories about a rheumatic elderly rabbit named Uncle Wiggily:

“He splashed around and scattered the skilligimink color all over the kitchen, and when his mamma and Susie fished him out, if he wasn’t dyed the most beautiful sky-blue-pink you ever saw!”

Yes, “sky-blue-pink”‘, its first mention in the world of words. And, isn’t “skilligimink” a scrumptious word? No one knows what it means – whaddaytathink?

We can all agree about sky-blue-pink, a color only One can make, not Uncle Wiggily. He’s a puffy-tailed fairy tale; God is real.