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Why is the Sky
Blue?"A
lyssa, wake up!" I said to my sister who had gone to sleep on the picnic blanket. It was a sunny spring day, and a warm breeze was blowing in from the south. My sister woke up. "I was wondering why the sky was blue and I guess I fell asleep," she said. She still sounded drowsy, and I could tell she wanted to go back to sleep. "Well we better start getting ready, its almost time to go home," I said.My sister walked over to my mom, who was sitting in the shade of an Elm tree that marked the middle of the park. It was a good climbing tree, and on the weekends
some of my buddies would go over to the park and climb it."Why is the sky blue?" my sister asked my mom loudly. My mom said something I couldn’t make out. "Oh", my sister said. She seemed disappointed with the answer. Whenever she didn’t like my mom’s answers, she asks my dad. Since my dad was playing Judo, there was only one other person to ask: me.
She looked around for my dad, forgetting where he was. She must have remembered, because a few seconds later, she came over to me. I was chugging a glass of orange juice and finishing up my sandwich. "Why is the sky blue?" she asked me. I thought about this. I didn’t want to go into the complicated details about the gasses mixing together, so I decided to make up a story. Here’s how it went:
"One day, a long, long time ago, a painter named Diablo decided to do something about the world. Everything was gray and drab." She interrupted me. "What does ‘drab’ mean?" my sister asked. "It means plain; no colors except for gray and white", I explained. "Oh", she said. "Now", I continued, "the world was gray and drab and it looked ugly to Diablo.
"So he decided to paint the world. He was going to paint the ocean, the land, the sky; everything. He did the ocean first. Diablo was very good at making magic paints. Diablo had invented all the colors and was going to use them to paint the world. He swam to the middle of the ocean with a magic bucket of blue paint. The painter dumped the bucket, and pretty soon, the whole ocean was blue.
"Next was the land. Unlike the ocean, Diablo didn’t want the whole land one color. So he mixed up a magic bucket of paint with all the colors that he could think of. He went to the middle of his village and dumped the paint there. Now every thing on the land had it’s own special color.
"Last was the sky. He made a giant ladder that reached up above the sky. Diablo climbed the ladder and brought all of his paints with him. He wanted the sky to be one color, but he would decide which color to paint it when he got up there. His mind told him it should be purple. But when he leaned over to get the purple paint, his foot knocked over the blue can and it colored the sky blue.
"He was very disappointed with what he had done, but when he got down the ladder and looked up, he saw how nice it was. The end." "Wow, that was a great story!" my sister remarked.
Now I am grown up, and have children of my own. And every time they ask, "Why is the sky blue?" I tell them the story I told my sister when I was younger.