Le Homme Bleu

A man doesn't have time in his life

to have time for everything.

He doesn't have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes

Was wrong about that.

| Yehuda Amichai |

My house here is covered in spiderwebs, but I don't dare touch them because it's more their house than mine, they have to live here when I'm gone and they never plotted against me.

For my last Saturday in France, I may take the six kilometer bike path to Chalabre, the closest town with a cafe that's open in August and the only supermarket within pedaling distance. The bike trail is a monument to the archaic blood of this whole region. The trail was once a train line when the industry boomed here decades ago. The decaying train stations rest recumbent along the path, the platforms cracked with weeds and wildflowers waiting like parents for their missing children to come home.

At the cafe, I will have coffee and when the barista asks the waitress who it's for, she will see me and say le homme bleu to him. In navy cargo shorts, a blue t-shirt, and my faded navy ballcap, I am the blue man and she says it roundly, warmly, like I'm of a period of time in which an artist used one color often, like Picasso in grey, and of course, Picasso in blue. When I pedal home, the sun will be starting to set, as it does here at 9:00 and I will sweep through the cornfields.

The longer I am away, the less the rest of the world exists, I forget what it's like to order in, I don't know which candidate has said something controversial that won't matter for months, and the life I'm not living there is finally begging me for the change I'm usually too weary to notice is needed, when I am covered in tallies of seconds lost to things I would let grow here, like wildflowers, like spiderwebs across the wooden corners, which are beautiful, painted as they are, in only one color.