Blue

In a New Post on your blog, share some writing inspired by yesterday's activities centered on Sharon Old's poem "The Blue Dress." Maybe something you put down in your journal using the sentence starters or something the poem reminds you of. This piece might be prose or poetry and doesn't have to be lengthy. Include an image, too. I'll include the poem and the sentence starters here...

• The gift was not what I expected...
• Divorce can really...
• If I'd known who he really was...
• She may have been lying...
• You casually mention that...

The Blue Dress

The first November after the divorce

there was a box from my father on my birthday--no card, but a

big box from Hink's, the dark

department store with a balcony and

mahogany rail around the balcony, you could

stand and press your forehead against it

until you could almost feel the dense

grain of wood, and stare down

into the rows and rows of camisoles,

petticoats, bras, as if looking down

into the lives of women. The box

was from there, he had braved that place for me.

I opened the box--I had

never had a present from him--

and there was a blue shirtwaist dress

blue as the side of a blue seal

disguised to go in safety on the steel-blue water.

I put it on, a perfect fit,

I liked that it was not too sexy, just a

blue dress for a 14-year-old daughter the way

Clark Kent's suit was just a plain suit for a reporter, but I

felt the weave of that mercerized Indian head cotton

against the skin of my upper arms and my

wide thin back and the skin of my ribs.

A year later, during a fight about

just how awful my father had been,

my mother said he had not picked out the dress,

just told her to get something not too expensive, and then

had not even sent a check for it,

that's the kind of man he was. So I

never wore it again in her sight

but when I went away to boarding School of Education

I wore it all the time there,

loving the feel of it, just

casually mentioning sometimes it was a gift from my father,

wanting in those days to appear to have something

whether it was true or a lie, I didn't care, just to

have something.

Sharon Olds