In the short non-fiction piece “Blue”, Mary B. Valencia subtly draws parallels between the alcoholic behavior of her lover that lands him in rehab and the home renovation phenomenon she finds herself entrenched in. The dismantling of two lives, their love and their home and the subsequent attempts at rebuilding (not all successful) is made only more powerful by the fact that it is not fiction.
Valencia has a seemingly effortless way of bringing the reader straight into the story: “I peeled away green painter’s tape from around the light socket and flicked the switch,” (45). Her tactile imagery alongside this everyday action makes me feel the tape under my own fingers. And later on my toes curl at this: “I dried off and walked downstairs without any clothes on. I never did that. I didn’t care that the back window had no curtain, that there were nails and sawdust on the floor, that a snake’s den of cable hugged the walls,” (47). I feel as though I am walking with her on that bare floor,welcoming the idea of physical pain to subside the emotional.
The story flashes between home renovations shows she becomes addicted to, fond and not so fond memories of the boyfriend (though even the fond ones give us glimpses of what is to come: while the two are racing another couple in canoes, “You steered sloppily, holding us back, but I kept counting”), not wanting to rid the house of him and then desperately trying to rid the house of him (46).
In the midst of finding hidden bottles and recalling fights, Valencia details a gentler moment: “I wished you had always been with me. That’s why I hung onto you us for so long, because of that moment when you loved me so perfectly,” (47).
Valencia weaves an undercurrent of change and possibility into each aspect of the story, you can choose not to get sober, you can add more storage space to accommodate the accumulation of your life, or you can start over, clean up. Even then, so concerned with what could be, you forget what is. She reminds us this can be a matter of our perspective: “You hated the chain link fence until I pointed out the visual depth. We weren’t constricted by the six-foot high wooden fences,” (48). We get to choose to see things the way they were or maybe, in a way, still are: “If you stood at the base of our pear tree, you could see an entire row of fruit trees – cherry, peach, apple – a stretched outline, a secret orchard in the city,” (48).
The final passage brings us into the garden, into the melting snow revealing items thought lost, and Valencia considers what she had found, what she could turn it into, and what it truly had been: “What was the yard like before these brick houses, garages and alleys? On the edge of this great lake, was there still a forest of tree roots under my feet?” (50).
And I didn’t even touch on the blue part… read it for yourself: “Blue” appears in the Fall issue of the Canadian journal PRISM international.
