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She tried to make him understand, but her words weren’t working. It wasn’t her fault: There are no words for what she attempted to explain.

“The color of the ocean during a late afternoon storm,” she said, nearly exasperated. “You know what I’m talking about? Do you have that color?”

We were in the homewares section of some hardware store or another. By then, honestly, they were sort of all running together. The plan was to pick out a paint color for the exterior of our house, and Julie knew exactly what she wanted.

“You’ve seen it, right?” she pleaded. “You know that color?”

He did not have that color. And he was not the first that day, nor the last, who did not have that color. That color is not on a Pantone color card. It has never been discussed on the Sherwin-Williams Colormix Forecast. Home Depot has no samples of The Color of the Ocean During a Summer Storm. Take my word for it.

But I knew the color. I knew precisely what Julie was talking about: the deep hue the ocean takes on when whipped to a frenzy as the edge of a summer storm sweeps over the water. It is blue but not blue. Gray but not gray. Hint of green. Pinch of indigo. And when you see that color, something beyond an appreciation for tint and tone strikes you deeply: the awe of the wild open ocean, the wonder that a place yet exists, the gratefulness of a summer storm’s promise. Let it rain. Let it pour. Let the waves pound the beach. Because there was sunshine before that storm, and there will be sunshine after.

That color that makes you feel all of that, down to your bone, right? That color. Exactly.

Does that come in a can? Aisle 6, perhaps?

• • •

For as long as I have known Julie, I’ve seen her watch for colors that have no words, no appellation, no label or designation. I’ve come to understand that there are colors so replete with meaning and memory that they cannot be described. They must be tasted, heard, and felt against your bare arms.

Given how long I’ve loved her, I’ve begun to see those colors myself.

Like The Color of a Perfectly Ripe Honeydew Melon. I’m telling you: Don’t get her started. Julie stalks honeydew melons like a hunter on the spoor of a water buffalo. There is great possibility and great danger. Buy a honeydew melon whose flesh is not The Color of a Perfectly Ripe Honeydew Melon, and you will be stuck with it for a week. You can’t just throw it out; that’s a crime against nature. And once it’s cut, it isn’t going to get much better.

That’s the problem with a good honeydew melon: You must cut it up before you know. You can shake and thump and sniff until the cows come home, but until you commit and halve that mysterious orb and see if it’s ripe — well, you’re just taking your chances. That color hits you in the feels. You see it, and suddenly it’s summer.

Blue Ridge Parkway vistas like Raven Rocks Overlook provide a front-row seat to the changing seasons. photograph by Paul Malcolm Photography

The color I can’t quite put my thesaurus on is the color of the very first leaves that emerge in spring. Green doesn’t do it justice. Calling a two-day-old beech leaf “green” is like calling Mona Lisa’s smile “curious.” Nowhere close. You come around a curve in the Blue Ridge Parkway where the road bends just so, and the south-facing forests are bathed in sunlight, and it’s almost more than you can bear. The trees are virescent and chartreuse and chlorochrous, but those are just descriptors; they are not words for The Color of Tender Young Leaves in the Spring. There is music for that color — you can hear it in Aaron Copland’s joyous Appalachian Spring — but no words.

I simply let the color wash over me and try not to plunge over Raven Rocks Overlook while riding a wild wave of Technicolor reverie. If there’s a blooming redbud in the mix, I am lost entirely. That is a color whose name is lost to some vanished tribe of yore, like the word for a passenger pigeon’s song or a Carolina parakeet’s whistle.

• • •

When it comes to indescribably unforgettable colors, North Carolina sets a high bar. From the Appalachians to the coast, our color palette would make a rainbow blush. The more I think about it, the longer the list of inexpressible hues. The Color Along the Trailing Edge of a Brook Trout’s Adipose Fin. The Color of Sauratown Mountain When Snow Is Coming. The Color of a Skate’s Egg Case. Is it blackish-gray? Sooty? Cinerously onyx? Not even close. Don’t even try.

Julie and I walk on the beach near Fort Macon, where there is little but dune and sand and water and sky. When a storm boils up from the south, we both grin. We know what’s coming.

“We never did find that color,” she says. “You know that’s one of my life disappointments.”

You might not be able to go to the hardware store and buy a can of The Color of the Ocean During a Summer Storm, but North Carolinians know the hue by heart. photograph by John Mauser

Oceanographers might tell Julie that The Color of the Ocean During a Summer Storm is actually a hue and tint grounded in physics and marine geology. That the roiled waters of a storm pick up sediments that affect the absorption of ultraviolent light, and that nutrients stirred up to the surface can spawn algal blooms that might tilt the color toward blue or green. I’ve read about this. I keep my mouth shut.

Such an explanation would make Julie sad. Why would anyone think like that? she’d say. That ruins everything!

In these circumstances, it’s best to be gentle. I see the color for the thousandth time, cloaking the ocean’s surface. “Help me understand,” I say. “What is that color? Use your words.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t need to explain it,” she says. “There are no words. That’s your job. Just look out there. I know you can see it.”

And I can.