Finally Made It To Blue

What's blue?
I love Annie's New Mexico sky photo. Has there ever been a bluer shade of blue?
I remember "Love Is Blue" from junior high mixers...oh boy, do I remember! I was the girl stuck to the wall -- praying somebody/anybody would ask me to dance while simultaneously scared to death somebody would.
And something old, new, borrowed, blue at my wedding -- well, that depends on which one we're talking about. Wedding #1, it was my bridesmaid's dresses. I still remember Carolyn and Kim and Debbie in those big floppy hats and their baby blue empire waist/Neru collared granny dresses with fistfuls of daisies...God, I miss the revolution!
Wedding #2 was a simpler event: backyard, justice of the peace, a few family members, our kids. What was blue?
Maybe it was my baby girl's beautiful eyes...so recently returned from almost certain death after a prolonged illness.
It could have been my heart...mourning the loss of my mother, not yet cold in her grave.
Blue was possibly the icing flowers on the cake that honored the start of our first year and the end of my husband's parents' 40th. Who could have known they'd have just three more?
Traditions are meaningful only when we make them so. I can't think that on the day of that second walk down the aisle they held much allure. I was beyond them. I had moved into practical survival mode and there was no room for frills. I had no pennies in my shoe or lace garter on my leg. I know we clinked champagne glasses but not long after that was done I was putting my new children to bed -- drying their tears as they wept for the lost home of their divorced parents.
That was thirty-something years ago and the beat goes on.
I read that psychics who claim the gift of the third eye, the ability to see auras, understand the blue emanations from a person indicate their deep rootedness in spirituality. People with blue auras tend to become social workers, teachers, writers, psychologists.
Or preachers?
I met an old Jewish lady named Gretchen several years ago. During the war her parents fled Germany with her in tow. Her father had been a famous artist there and the one thing he carried with him across the snowy mountains was a cask of cobalt. She explained that his signature etchings were done in the deepest of blue derived from this semi-precious element.
I spent an afternoon with her and when I readied myself to go she ran to her back room and returned with a cobalt blue pottery plate, formed by her own hands on the wheel that sat in the corner and fired in the kiln on her back porch.
It was flawed, she confessed. But she could not bear to throw it out. The blue in the clay was from the last of her father's precious stash.
An imperfect blue plate sits on my shelf and I love its story, its significance, its likeness to me, my days on the planet, my journey through time.