Historically accurate, but temporary

The last few days have been cool and windy -- 60s overnight, 70s daytime, gusts up to 30 -- so Roy was happy to start priming our shutters today during relative calm.

They're going to be an intense blue, so he went to Sherwin Williams with an order for tinted primer that would work. They came up with this. And at that point, my Wayback Machine kicked in.

After World War II, the Navy started shutting down in Key West and elsewhere. It had to dump hundreds of gallons of battleship gray paint -- and impoverished Key Westers (the economy had tanked postwar) scarfed them up. Nature here is brutal, and everything needs painting a lot.

When you scrape houses down here, you find battleship gray. Ditto, when you scrape our shutters down a few decades from now, under the brilliant blue that will adorn them oh, so soon.