blue-handed

On a flight to visit family for the Easter weekend, I looked out the little window to see the Rocky Mountains below — and so many blues! I thought of some of the essays in my book, Blue Portugal & Other Essays, and how I wrote about the blue I experienced as a result of retinal damage (entoptic phenomena), the history of indigo dye, the feathers of my beloved Steller’s Jays (two of whom are outside squawking for seeds as I write this). When the weather gets a little warmer, I’ll be setting up for a season of dye work, indigo and woad, and I will be the woman you see in the grocery store, blue-handed, choosing apples.

Where does blue come from, what does it mean? I ask myself the questions and my answers are personal, deeply subjective. I’m not alone in my attraction to blue. Maybe we love it because our blue mind loves the ocean (though Homer described it as “wine-dark,” possibly alluding to its pellucid qualities rather than its colour), a clear sky: we want our world to be clean and untainted. A string of azurite beads thumbed on the wrist as a way to cleanse thinking, to focus the inner eye.

After a dinner party, I wash a new cloth for the first time, rinsing out the small spills of juices from the casserole, some splashes of red wine. The cloth is block-printed cotton, dark indigo, printed with white leaves. I bought it at a pop-up shop in the Masonic Hall in Roberts Creek, choosing it from dozens of possible tablecloths folded on a table in the middle of the room. I could smell its dye. Probably not indigo—synthetic dyes have largely replaced the traditional compounds of madder, turmeric, henna, teak tree, and acacia bark—but then when I hang it to dry, my hands are stained blue. I leave them blue on purpose, to remind me of the months ahead when my own dye vat will be placed on a bench created by a felled cedar, boards sliced from it until the core was left.
–from “The Blue Etymologies”, Blue Portugal & Other Essays (University of Alberta Press, 2022)