[…]Cimmy washed the shirt repeatedly for the next several days, but the blue was there to stay. In light of the disaster du jour, Cimmy had another heretical thought, the kind that had reliably gotten her in trouble since she had started taking her first steps into the world. A shirt that was stained blue was not acceptable, but if she managed to make the entire shirt blue, that would probably be alright. She wasn’t given to situational analysis, and therefore she did not contemplate the impact of being the only person with a blue shirt in a village full of tan ones, so she went back out into the field and picked a large bundle of the weeds with blue flowers, took them home and boiled them together with her shirt. Problem solved.

She was surprised to find a knotted bundle of threads at the bottom of the pot after she threw away the blue water, threads a lot softer and silkier than the scratchy thistle fibers her shirt was made of, and they were all bright blue, like the sky and the waters, and looked so beautiful that they didn’t seem to belong to this world.

There were no such colors and such softness in her world, and while looking at them and feeling their softness caress her fingers, she wondered whether she didn’t actually venture into that dream world of hers after all.

She spent all afternoon removing the bits of woody stem still stuck in the wondrous fibers, and then she unraveled the knots and split the sturdy bundles into thinner and thinner threads, until they were lighter than the breeze and so thin she could barely see them.

When she was done, she ended up with a lot of thread, so she stretched it on the loom and made a piece of cloth out of it, finer than gossamer and lighter than the breeze, a cloth whose color seemed to have been drawn directly from the sky.[…]

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit francisrosenfeld.substack.com