11 The Blue
Anne-Marie Oomen
I missed my father, my friends more than I could say.One day, the sweater disappeared. Gone. I can’t articulate the contradictions I felt. Relief—something had taken it at last, and loss—all over again. That swath of ultramarine had hung like a spirit friendship with a woman I never knew, but I did know because of her skill and her daughter’s gift. It also stood for my lost friends. Their spirits, that blue. I studied the ground under the clothesline, scuffed through the garden, searching for the remnants. Nothing.
Later, while packing up the garden one rough-winded day, I caught sight of a blue strand. It led under the woodshed. When I dislodged an old clay pot, there, a blue tangle woven with dry leaves in a nest where a mouse or vole had kept warm. All through late fall, I found traces, a strand hooked in the wood pile, a filament caught in the window box, and once, what might have been a clump in a tree. A squirrels’ nest woven blue into the cross-hatch of high-tree debris?
They were using it, but I had not seen. Like grief I suppose, eventually we weave it in, but invisibly.
Around Thanksgiving, I found what remained of the sweater in the ravine below our house. Just tatters, but identifiable. It had finally faded to the tired blue after storm. What remained fell apart in my hands; those warm mornings frayed in my fingertips. I stood on the hillside, amazed. Here was a piece of sky, now of earth, scattered by chance winds and the choices of wild creatures. What was lost? Warmth, color, connection? What was gained? A nest, a coil of new meaning, some organic fiber woven into a home. I leave it there in the wild. I’m a fool for loss, but there’s also beauty: sky on a partly sunny morning, light warming the winter garden, the ecology of being human with mouse, squirrel, sweater and winter.
That deep blue dusk as dark comes on.
It’s not done yet. Nearing Solstice, as we move wood out of the woodshed, I discover a phoebe nest in the eaves. Left from summer. When I pull it down to check if the nest had been a success, there, a thin filament of blue looping in the grassy bowl of emptiness. All through our woods, that blue has been knitted a second time. This is how creatures do it, making useful those faded but enduring fibers. Here, just before the year turns, I tug a single-strand from spiraled grasses. I let it catch the wind. Here’s what matters, the way this cast-off never fully decays, the way friendship lives on in memory, and then becomes sacred in its adaptive use—blue thread still linking an endless sky to a battered but vital earth.
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Anne-Marie Oomen is author of Lake Michigan Mermaid with Linda Nemec Foster (Michigan Notable Book for 2018), Love, Sex and 4-H (Next Generation Indie Award for Memoir), Pulling Down the Barn (Michigan Notable Book); and Uncoded Woman (poetry), among others. She edited ELEMENTAL: A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction. She teaches at Solstice MFA at Pine Manor College (MA), Interlochen’s College of Creative Arts (MI), and at conferences throughout the country.
“The Blue” by Anne-Marie Ooman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. This work was previously published on mynorth.com.
