Blue

It wasn’t her imagination. It really did seem to be raining inside her century old and then some Victorian. Her first thought was that the ceiling-a painted inky indigo sky with golden moon and stars, plaster cracked in jagged streaks of lightening lines-was leaking.  Summer thunder afternoon, and she was sitting on her couch in what had been, back in the day when her house was built, the parlor. A word that these days made her think of tattoos and pizza. She’d been amid her own personal storm, crying so much that she felt like she had no more tears left, and looking up at the heavenly depiction overhead, she was startled to see drops of water falling from on high. Not falling from her ceiling though but appearing to materialize out of thin air.

~

I was, at the moment, seated near her on her sofa, which was covered in a softly worn sapphire velvet, the singular curve of the arms and back surrounding all who sat on it in a warm Chesterfield hug. Watching her, face in her hands, I wondered what had caused her so much heartache. I’d spent many hours in this parlor. Overstuffed with memories, favorable and not so much, that made me reminisce. What my life had been, now that it was no more, and I felt myself floating. I was able to do that now. I let myself drift up to where I could hover alone with my remembering, just below the ceiling covered with the mural that I had painted on a similarly leaden day a century and then some ago. An inky indigo sky with golden moon and stars. Tears then. Tears now.