Blue

Blue. Before I knew it. An absolute so immanent that it goes unnoticed. Of course a sky mottled with clouds. Of course a blue raincoat. A ribbon. Water. A gleam of silver, bluish, in a raindrop watched for hours. White slime of slugs moving over grass. Salt. My eyes. My grandfather's eyes. Shade in the forest. But air, blue air, always blue. So blue its color seemed to shift hues, seemed to enter through the windows in the late afternoon, through the daffodil-yellow of the wall-to-ceiling drapes, warming to orange the mocha walls and the oatmeal loops of the carpeted living room. Sunsets over the mountains to the west, the salt water between us, seemed too, to shift hues with light, with weather. We were not blind to purple or lavender or the cranberry hiding in the center of apple blossoms. Nor in fact, were we blind to the abundance of all the floral hues around us. But the immanent blue, the blue inherent all around us, the blue that clung to everything, we could not see it until we lost it. Until we left it. The blue in the air that passes over half a world of ocean, spills its color into the rivers and on to the mountains, spills onto the Cascades and the high Rockies, and changes hues as it passes onto the plains and prairies. It's that blue, that Western blue, the one I know by absence, that colors.