A cloudy day, blustery, the sky is one big cloud. No shapes. No elephants, no apples, no dinosaurs, no man smoking a huge pipe. Cloudy day, starlings warbling in the trees, so black against the soft blue background. Not really blue at all. Blue-white, blue-gray.When I was young we lived in an apartment building in Waxahachie. There was a cotton field next to it. When the cotton was harvested there were always bits of cotton left behind on the empty husks. The earth was gray, the stalks of the cotton plant were brown, spent, dead, the little bits of cotton were like clouds floating by, caught in the husks and on the branches.
One time the bright sky was full of fluffy clouds. Not storm clouds, just sun-blocking cloudy. A storm of passing shadows. I loved the sky when it was full of clouds, so full that the clouds crowded each other downward and seemed to be not far from touching the ground, nearly close enough to reach up and touch them. I ran along the ground when the shadows floated by. Pretended I could fly on the clouds like they did in cartoons, wished that I could, wished there was a way out.
One time the sun pushed through the fluffy clouds, a circle of beams came down from the sky in the middle of the cotton field. I was playing alone. I got a sudden scary feeling that the Rapture was about to take place, or that it was in the process of taking place, and I couldn't imagine that I was ready for the Rapture, not with the thoughts that plagued my mind, not with the sins I committed in my heart. I was all alone. I often played alone. I liked to play alone. Or I was used to it. I was okay with it because that's just the way it was, that was the way it had to be.
I saw the clouds from above for the first time when my uncle took me to New York City. They were the same from above as they were from below, scattered out shapes that reminded me of things, animals, people doing weird things. Up in an airplane you can watch a far off cloud for a long time, watch it as it changes from a whale to a mountain to a spewing volcano to a woman with a grocery cart to a car pulling a camper to a cluster of islands on a brownish reddish sea.
When I flew to Scotland, I saw clouds formed by the wings. Little white lines seemed to be spewing out of the wings, sometimes just dots, like Morse Code. I don't know Morse Code but I was convinced that if I did I would be able to see some sort of message being written in the sky with the Morse Code clouds. It could've been a mundane message, or perhaps it was something very serious, not just about this planet, this atmosphere, a message from some unseen force in our galaxy to another.
If you believe in such things.
I believed that I could sit on a cloud when I was young, and I had dreams that I was doing that. But if I stepped on the wrong part of the cloud -- blip! -- my foot would go right in, disappear in the cloudiness.
Cloudy day. It's Earth Day. It seems like it should be sunny. I don't know why. A cloudy day doesn't seem right somehow for Earth Day. But maybe all of the clouds have come to see what's going on for Earth Day in our little green town.
