The Blue Fish by Rebecca Newton Abbit

Today, if you stand with me at my kitchen sink and look out the window toward the garden gate that opens into the woods, a spot of blue will catch your eye. 

Your gaze will narrow and if your vision is reasonably good, you’ll recognize the blue is shaped like a fish.

Why is a mosaic fish stepping stone leaning against the arbor? You might wonder.

It’s an unlikely spot for a stepping stone, I’ll admit. 

Shouldn’t a stepping stone rest in the path on the way to somewhere? 

Yes, I once thought so, too. But the edges of this stepping stone are too sharp for that.

Why keep a mosaic stepping stone whose edges are too sharp?

She was a gift. She is a gift. Yet I didn’t always see her in this light.

When I was married, a blue fish porcelain spoon rest, made in Japan, adorned my kitchen counter. I had found the piece at an estate sale and liked it very much.

One Friday, when we’d been getting ready to head to the lake for the weekend, the spoon rest shattered, as often happens with those things we cherish. I had been washing dishes in a hurry. 

On that day like on so many others, every nerve in my body had been standing on edge as I stood at the kitchen sink. I was staring out the kitchen window. A different kitchen window in a different house, a different me looking out at a different yard: the suburban lawn, the wood fence, and the neighbor’s white house behind. It certainly was not the shade garden you see today. There was no garden gate opening into the woods. 

It hadn’t mattered how we honed our routine for departure, it was always stressful. I could never know when something would happen to trigger my then-husband, and he would become enraged again. 

So little hope and so much despair filled me that day as on so many others, and it felt like things would always be this way. 

My attention jolted back to the present. I heard the sound of the spoon rest shattering on the tile floor. 

Plenty got broken on purpose during our marriage. The spoon rest wasn’t one of them. Still, I felt crushed again at that moment.

I gathered up the pieces of the spoon rest, put them in a Ziplock bag, and tucked them away. The fragments seemed too pretty to throw out. 

As a child, I liked to go rummaging in the gulley where my family disposed of non-burnable trash (yes, we were those folks). Among the rusty tin cans and oxidizing plastic jugs, I’d once uncovered a fragment of a porcelain bowl with a magenta rose on it. It hadn’t mattered that it was broken or that I’d found it in the garbage pile. Not to me. It was beautiful. I washed it and kept that shard among my other childhood treasures for years.

But after my divorce, I found the pieces of the blue fish spoon rest while unpacking in my new home. A friend was over that day so I mentioned my idea to make a mosaic stepping stone with them.

The thought of another project amidst all the unpacking and organizing didn’t sound like fun. But my friend said she had done something similar recently, salvaging shards of her husband’s favorite bowl by turning them into a mosaic stepping stone. 

Would she consider making a stepping stone from the fish bits? I wondered. 

She said she would.  

It had seemed simple enough. I’ve never made a mosaic stepping stone, but I had assumed she would break up the larger pieces so they would all be about the size of a dime and could be laid more or less flat, in concrete, to make a functional stepping stone. 

A few weeks passed. She brought me a heavy housewarming gift. Unwrapping the package, I set eyes upon the fish spoon rest, reincarnated as a stepping stone. 

My hopes for a functional stepping stone were dashed at first glance. Instead of breaking up the shards further as I had envisioned, my friend had embedded the existing pieces, some as large as a piece of sushi, some as large as my palm, in the concrete. Due to the contours of the original spoon rest (slightly concave), this meant the fragments didn’t lie flat, but the sharp edges poked up well above the surface of the stone. 

I tried to hide my disappointment. 

She said she had been unsure about breaking the pieces into smaller bits for fear of obliterating the pattern so she had worked with the pieces as they were. And now they were literally set in stone.

I responded as graciously as I could. Now not only did I not have the spoon rest, but I also didn’t have the shards either. There was no hope of fixing it. What good was it? Why hadn’t I just done the project myself?

For some time, I found it difficult to look at the stepping stone. I certainly didn’t see it as “a thing of beauty…a joy forever” (Keats). So, with some feelings of guilt, and not a lot of gratitude, I hid it in a shady corner of the garden amongst the hostas. In the months that followed, the blue fish migrated from spot to spot. 

As you might imagine, it was more than the stepping stone that troubled me. My life wasn’t looking much like what I’d hoped for either. And I couldn’t look away from that reality. Here I was, approaching 40, divorced, no seminary degree, no kids, and my biological clock winding down. And to think how I’d clutched my hopes for marriage, higher education, and a family of my own! About as tightly as I have clutched those broken bits of china over the years. 

And as bittersweet as it was, I didn’t stop looking at the blue fish stepping stone and the shape my new life was beginning to take.

Then one day while I was watering the hosta corner where the stepping stone had come to rest again, I realized it didn’t seem all that gruesome anymore. The cobalt blue looked pretty amongst all the shades of green. 

That’s when I propped her against the trellis. And I thought to myself, this is good. I wasn’t just referring to the mosaic fish, you understand.

Because she is a gift. A stepping stone that had started life as a spoon rest and become a sculpture. A beautiful life after divorce? Who could have imagined?

Today, as I stand at the sink washing dishes, looking out this wide window, my mind might wander to the past while I gaze up into the trees above my tiny fenced garden. 

But then the blue beckons at ground level and my eyes light on the fish, I focus. As with my life, her place in the world is very different than her original creator or I might have intended. And though she is refashioned from broken pieces, she reflects the care of loving, gentle hands. My perfectionism has been dashed, yet somehow God has been at work redeeming the brokenness. 

Today when I look out at the blue fish against the arbor, I don’t compare her so much to the spoon rest she once was or with the literal stepping stone I’d envisioned when I gathered the fragments. 

Instead, she reminds me of my own brokenness and of the kindness of friends, who have—quite literally in this case—helped me to pick up the pieces of my life and arrange them in some semblance of order. I see her as she is, with the sharp edges she can’t hide, still beautiful, leaning against the arbor where the purple clematis trails upward.

Rebecca Newton Abbit resides in St. Charles, Missouri. She enjoys working from home, reading, writing, reflecting, gardening, knitting, walking her dog, meeting up with friends and neighbors, and visiting family in other states—when she isn’t gazing out the kitchen window, that is.