The story of the blue fox was told to me by my mother. The story of the blue fox takes place entirely at the funeral of her beloved Aunt Nellie, who died September 12, 1950, one day after turning 76 and seven days before my mother turned 20.
She said she first saw the blue fox through the window of the car she was riding in among the procession along the road from Ripley Church in Carbon Hill, Alabama, through the thick wooded lowlands to Smith Chapel Cemetery. The blue fox was alongside darting through the dense trees effortlessly until it finally moved deeper into the woods and disappeared.
She said to me never mind that there’s no such thing as a blue fox in Alabama. She saw what she saw and it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever laid eyes on short of the first time she’d ever laid eyes on me.
Gathered with family around the grave, mother said she looked up from Nellie’s casket being lowered and there was the blue fox again, this time sitting still at the tree line which surrounded the cemetery.
The fox stared at my mother and my mother stared back at the fox until she looked back down when the casket came to rest at the bottom.
Here eyes returned immediately to where the blue fox was but the blue fox was not there..
On the drive back home she said she searched for the blue fox running among the trees to no avail.
My mother told me her wish after she died was for me to take her ashes home to Carbon Hill, Alabama, and bury her beside her Aunt Nellie.
And when you do, she said, look for the blue fox.