L'Heure Bleue

I'll begin with a washtub full of toadstools.

You don't see many examples of great literature begin with the sentence over this one, so I'm off the hook. No pressure. Norma paints things "bleu", like buckets, buildings and old beloved rusted tools, and they become hers. I don't let her paint my 8-horsepower wood-chipper bleu, part of our marriage vow 45 years ago. Consider:

                                         My old shovel head!

                                           My little ladder!

                                                    My field-gate!

                                               My sainted grampa's bunghole borer!!!!

I find I am to blame, at least for the toadstools. I miscalculated the kindness of extraterrestrials. They came not as full-grown entities but as spores, not to save us from Atomic Destruction and politics of idiocy, but from being crushed by billions of trees falling over billions of years and not rotting away. My wood chipper provides cellulose material for toadstools to thrive. How did they get to earth? I have composed a palpable theory. Observe:

Here you see a toadstool from outer space preparing to dust our planet with spores and spare us from smothering under fallen trees by eating them up. How did I develop this theory? By observing the clues and silences on the subject in this girl for nearly half a century:

Is this the face of someone who'd paint things bleu for no particular reason? Decidedly, she is trying to tell us something, something important. Funding of education may be made impossible, the plug may be pulled on our internet and all human knowledge since paper books prove electronically written in disappearing ink, but paper made from trees will always be available. There is an intergalactic initiative to keep this planet producing pulp. It foments in the reader's heart, the cosmos and comes from out of the bleu.