Desert-dwellers love green. The color. But particularly the notion of living flora. Grass. Leaves. Trees. Shrubs. Because where we live, nothing like that occurs in nature. It can be replicated, at significant cost, and with prodigious amounts of desalinated water, but otherwise … our natural world is 100 shades of brown.

So, a place like Princeton, New Jersey, where the default color is green … almost any view into the distance is a sort of an emotional moment.

Look! It’s green!

One of the great advantages to a temperate clime, one where plants live and thrive, is the ability to exercise out of doors.

In Abu Dhabi and Dubai, in the UAE, only the very brave or very fit or very misinformed exercise outside for this half of the year.

To live in Princeton is to be, at all times, no more than about 500 yards from the woods, and shaded paths that provide a walking/jogging venue even when it is warm and muggy — and it often is, in central New Jersey, this time of year.

(Princeton seems very green in the other sense, too: the environmental.)

Above, is the lake and the surrounding wildlife that can be found about half a mile from where my daughter lives.

Below, is the entrance to the shaded lane that takes a person to the lake.

I was out there again today, and it apparently it is not uncommon to see someone during a circuit of a lake. Another jogger. Someone exercising a dog.

It seems to me, a native of greater Los Angeles who spent most of his adult life in the arid Inland Empire and now lives in the even more arid UAE … that it must be so easy to exercise in a place like Princeton. Two minutes, a person can be in the woods, and you hear the birds and the insects, and to see the dappled sunlight on the ground, where it has evaded the leaves above …

It’s a sort of spiritual nourishment.

Perhaps we desert people would soon tire of winters in these green places … but I would be willing to put it to the test.