Staring into the Blue

 

 

Each morning I take a small, circuitous walk of my in-the-middle-of-nowhere-in-Africa garden (an anomaly: suburbia juxtaposed with sprawling, arid isolation). It’s desiccating fast. Jaundiced grass thin and dry and spitefully sharp against bare feet; termite tunnels crumble where I tread, meringue fragile. The dogs follow me. My old-gold lab suffers with stiff hips early in the day; it means she walks as if dancing in dressage, a little gingerly: an elderly lady on too-high heels. The cat follows at a safe, disdainful distance.

My mind is full of my son’s departure. He leaves home tomorrow. School done. Future yawns. He has declined a place at university, in lieu of another journey, an adventure of a different shape, and I am pleased for I think, for a while, he felt compelled to follow in other footsteps. Convention is sometimes safer, especially when the shape of shoe has already hollowed your path rendering it a little easier. Perhaps my constant admonishment when the children were younger, don’t be sheep, struck somewhere, sometime and stuck. So that now he has the courage of his convictions to try a slightly different road.  

I am acutely aware of sand slipping through fingers. Of imminent and seismic change. It’s good: it’s all good: it’s what we’re meant to do, us mothers – yield to the freedom of fledglings, encourage them out, shoo, shoo, on your way now as we, I, write itineraries, fill envelopes with hidden dollar bills (just in case) and top up cell phone credit, stay in touch, I urge. But it was partly in this loss, in this changing shape, mutating role, that my mother lost her grip, became unhinged from the happiness that rooted her until Depression slunk in and reduced her world to grey. I know for sure now: the scientists have proved it.  Hell isn’t Blue; it’s the colour of rain clouds.

But as I walk, tailed by my menagerie,  I squint up at the sky and see just blue. Blue and sunshine. And I hope that bracing myself for a shift in patterns and demands and role means it will be a little less jarring.

That the Blue will continue to obliterate the Grey.