A Blue Long Gone...

I hadn’t seen it, this color blue, for many, many years. But there it was squiggling over and across the waves, taking me back in time, back to my youth, back when I noticed things like this color blue.

I was on a snorkeling trip out of Kanantik Jungle Resort on the southeast coast of Belize and was sitting on the starboard side of the snorkel boat as it bounced along briskly, and I guess it was the polarity of my cheap clip-on shades but as I looked into the waves we cut over, dancing on the surface were these delicate, long lines, strings of them, a blur of blue that I suspect was a prismatic play on the sky’s reflection, but these squiggles on the water were the same shade of blue I’d seen as a child.

These long, wavering thin blue lines reminded me of that blue long gone, a blue I’d not seen since, a blue of precisely this tone that jogged my memory back to it instantly. Not a sky blue or cobalt blue or cerulean blue. It was deeper than powder blue, sharper, leaning toward but not quite violet, not as intense as purple. It was the color of my favorite crayon as a child, a color that just seeing again made the smell of the crayon come back, almost a candy-chemical scent and the feel as well, the feel of the paper around it, not smooth, not coarse, but a texture in between that every one long remembers. I don’t recall seeing that precise color crayon ever again.

But it was there, this color in velvety strands skipping along the waves moving as fast as the boat was, as fast as childhood escapes those who deserve it most and don’t know how fleeting it is until enough time has paced to lend perspective to what’s been lost and yearned for. The sight of that color brought my soul back to a time of innocence and huggy aunts and grandparents and Sunday afternoon meals that melted into night and black-and-white football on TV, a time when a mother’s soothing “It’ll be all right” meant that it would be all right.

I was going to retrieve my camera and take a picture, but feared it wouldn’t reproduce the magic adequately, and I didn’t want to leave the deck and lose the feeling and leave that color behind for an instant, I just wanted to embrace and enjoy it for as long as I could

And then the clouds scudded across the sky and the color was gone and we got to the snorkeling place and I soon forgot about that blue. Again.

I miss it. Again.