tangled up in blue

To me, blue represents both safety and escape

All the men in my life have blue eyes; my husband’s eyes are slate blue like a calm sea, my father’s eyes pale blue, as in the Velvet Underground song, and my brother’s eyes a startling blue with distinctive flower-pattern irises.

On my wedding day, I wove blue flowers into my hair—cornflowers, grown in my mother-in law’s garden and transported from London to Suffolk in carefully-packed bunches. My husband wore a blue tie, and a cornflower in his button hole and I dressed my young bridesmaids in frocks of Liberty print blue. At the end of the evening, guests took away with them the jam-jars of homegrown flowers that had decorated the tables, leaving behind a scattered blue trail of cornflower petals as I plucked the last cornflower from the twisted ringlet behind my ear.

In a small, tidy wood beside the barn where we married, bluebells grow in the spring time, a shimmering carpet. When my Granny was alive, we took her to see them. ‘Oh, they are lovely!’ she exclaimed as we walked the path between the trees, treading carefully so as not to stray close to the edges and bruise the petals. I inhaled the delicate scent, a faint floral whisper. Afterwards, there was a cup of tea in the barn, with two sugars—my Granny liked spring flowers and she liked sweet tea.

‘The world is blue’, writes Rebecca Solnit ‘at its edges and in its depths.’ She calls this blue at the horizon, where sky meets land or sea, ‘a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue’. She calls it ‘the blue of distance’. I swim every week—in the sea, the quarry, or the marine lake—immersing myself in the blue of water, which is really the blue of scattered light. As I strike out into the cold and wait for my breathing to regulate, I keep my eyes on the distant blue of the horizon, thinking only in that moment of water and of air. To me, blue represents both safety and escape—a moment of calm in a gathering storm. Blue is a colour, but it is also a feeling. With the shock of the cold I shake off my blue feelings, sending them spinning away like water droplets from shimmied shoulders.

In the spreading ancient woodland on the hill beside my parents’ house, bluebells flow between the beech trees. When my boys were little, we visited each year at bluebell time. My smallest boy wore a blue sunhat that matched the flowers, my eldest boy a blue raincoat. My middle boy, in a blue fair isle jumper, found a fallen flower on the path and held it up to show me. I asked him for a photograph, and he brandished it like a sword. Later that week, I met my father for a walk in the wood. He stood, smiling in a checked shirt, waiting between the trees as I snapped picture after picture of the soft blue waves.

My first son arrived into the world with eyes that echo his uncle’s—blue, with delicate cornflower-pattern irises—but when my second son was born, his eyes were a deep, deep brown. Perhaps, I thought, this boy will have my colouring—hazel-green eyes like me—but as time passed, his eyes grew lighter and lighter, finally settling to slate blue, like his dad. Only one small segment of my youngest son’s eyes reflects the hazel of mine; his eyes are heterochromatic, a singular slice of brown in his left eye, the remainder of his eyes clear blue.

All the men in my life have blue eyes—I am, and forever will be, tangled up in blue.

Thank you for reading,

Laura x

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