Blue

Delectable enough to make you gasp going by drinking it in. Rarely was a stretch of water ever sighted as fulsome as that standing like an offering on a saucer. (In Sing adults sometimes slurped from saucers.) Years ago an art teacher friend had memorably characterised blue as a cold colour, when you had thought the beach, sky and even pictorial representation as warm and inviting. Baby blue. Egg shell. The soft pastels in the Derwent standup box. Certainly not cold. Further along grades of navy began seeping in. There was only light overcast. By the time the beach was reached a spattering of rain had begun to lash briefly, angled from clouds that stood away from the path. Further along again another couple of kilometres near the mangroves snot in the tone and all the lusciousness gone. After days of shirt-sleeves—or single layer thermal sleeves at least, with tee & sleeveless hoodie on top—the chill of the morning had come with a wallop. Sitting up in bed after brekkie the second doona had needed to be fetched. Five degrees it had been at departure mid-afternoon. Last week on two consecutive days blowies had buzzed through the window behind the bed, though certainly they had quickly disappeared. Last week a YouTube interview from the 80s had featured a novelist and writing teacher whose one and only rule for students had been no weather in the compositions. Understandably, especially in the US, the earlier generation had no call for that kind of thing. You had to take big salty gulps wheeling by, as usual recalling Knut Hamsun after his TB diagnosis on the train going back to Europe refusing to accept the fate the doctors had tried to hang on him. Brilliant heroic old fascist. State of disaster officially declared. Last week Georgina in Darwin, originally a Melbourne gal herself, who had also cared for an aged parent to the end, remarked in a mail that the oldies in the homes would now confuse their periods with the presence of the fatigues. In the pic of the middle-aged blonde Greek wife of the nursing home mogul the dame sits in her leathers on the bonnet of a Lamborghini, turned aside as the wind blows her hair.

NB. Since published by Sunspot Lit., (US) March 2021