Predawn Divinations

The dawn sky this morning was striated with what my grandfather would have called skyblue-pink clouds. He was color blind, and as a child I could not comprehend what it meant to live in a world without color. I would pester him to describe to me what he saw, but he had no means of translating. Eventually we settled on mud soup, and somehow we got around to skyblue-pink being his favorite color. I forget how, but now writing this I suddenly realize that at the time, I’d been fiercely torn between pink and blue as my favorite colors.

Because of the fair coloring I sported throughout my childhood, nearly every article of clothing purchased for me was pink. At around age eight or nine, I began to fall in love with blue. My grandmother did not pick up on the hints, though, and continued buying me skirts and shirts in every shade of pink. Every once in a while a blue blouse would sneak into a bag, and I knew my grandfather had actually participated in shopping for a change instead of sitting out on a bench in front of the department store, keeping guard over my grandmother’s bounty.

It turned into a family joke between us, his favorite color, the pink skirts he’d staple into shorts as soon as we got out of my grandmother’s line of sight, which would have impressed any bird of prey. There was no escaping her hearing; my grandfather and I could have been three hundred yards from the house and she’d still have heard him curse—and chided him for it. I didn’t see the fuss at the time, but then again, I currently pepper my speech with words that would have made my poor grandmother’s fingernails curl. And I love, savor each and every word.

Not every day in Lymeland begins with a beautiful dawn, nor with fond decades-old memories that feel like yesterday. Nearly every day, though, begins with me rising well before dawn, most days because my body pain prompts me to get out of bed and move. I try to do so slowly, as I tend to lose my balance early in the morning and have no depth perception until I fully wake. And since I usually fail to plan ahead and prep my coffee the night before, I’ve learned to brew a pot by Braille. Rather like divining through tea leaves, the ratio of coffee to grounds in my morning cup has proven to be a strong indicator of how my days unfold. I’m on my third cup this morning (my doctors would not approve) and have yet to find a single stray bit of bean.