Blues

A lonley woman stands pegging out her washing in the still morning cool.

She looks at the clear early morning blue of the cloudless sky, and is reminded of her mother's eyes, which were just the colour of this early morning clear paleish blue sky.

A wash of forlorn loneliness for her mother sweeps over the woman. Still, after thirteen long years, the sting, the ache, of missing her mother remains, as sharp and painful as ever.

She remembers the man who fell in love with her mother. He used to sing "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?" to her mother every time he saw her. It became a sort of joke and her friends and work colleagues teased her mother about the man. He had curly gold hair, and a wide smile, and bluer than Burmese-blue-sapphire eyes, which sparkled with joy, whenever he looked at her mother.

The woman remembered, that as a child, she had liked this man, whose simple adoration of her mother had seemed so kind and true, and just plain loving. She remembered thinking, that if her father could not be in her life, this man would be alright. He had none of the guile, or slyness some other men seemed to hold. She felt he would cherish and treasure her mother, in a way she deserved.

This man, who sang or whistled with joy around her mother, was a hardworking man. He had no wife or children of his own. The child the woman was then, did not understand why this good man was alone.

Now, she gazes up at the blue sky, and sees that perhaps the man was thought to be too 'simple' too 'uncomplicated'. She does not doubt that his love for her mother was true, but on reflection, his intellect would probably not have equalled her mother's, which was quick and restless and ever questing for knowledge.

Another man, with foxy thin features and sly, muddy brown eyes, also fell in love with her mother. A man who had no right to love her mother. He already had a wife, sons, of his own.

As a child the woman had detested this man. The man once told her mother that if looks could kill, her daughter would have surely had him long dead. It was true.

It ended in tears, with her mother's beautiful blue eyes crying. She held no illusions that the man would or could, leave his wife and young sons. She did not wish another broken family, with children to mourn the loss of their father.

Years later, when the woman understood more of the causes of her mother's grief and pain, she remembered the shadows, which often passed across her mother's morning-blue, mourning-blue eyes. She wished her mother's life could have been different.

Wished sometimes that the simple man, with his singing, could have cherished her mother and loved her forever.

Looking up at the later, bluer sky, clouding over, the woman recognized that life's blues are often like the swiftly changing skies.