Clouds

 Like everyone else in the world, I've been looking at clouds my whole life.  Puffy and wispy or dark and threatening.  Finding pictures and shapes.  The shifting nature and the shape altering.  Clouds.  Beautiful. Predicting and changing the weather.

I'm trying to memorize a poem and within this poem is a beautiful line, "The sun glinting off the turrets of clouds".  Ah, exactly!

The other day I had an epiphany about clouds.  For as long as I've been watching clouds I never thought  about how this works.  Oblivious.  Taking clouds for granted; not even considering the mechanism.

One morning in early January, feeling especially grumpy for some now forgotten reason, I was driving to Stauffers grumping along to myself, muttering about some minuscule something.  Driving over the crest of the hill on Woods Dr, the sky before me was suddenly aflame in bright pink light, extraordinarily scrumptious.  From the fields below to the top of the sky, my whole field of vision was glowing in neon pink.  It was breath-taking!  With this much grandeur before me I was stunned into gratitude, jolted out of my glum attitude, my eyes tearing up as I wondered how I could let some petty nothing transfix my day with funk when the world could be so beautiful.

On my way home I had expected the clouds to hold some of their same magnificence, but they had turned dark, a little threatening even.  What had been glory only 30 minutes before had turned to gloom.  But oh!  How could I have missed this for so many years?  Now the sun was above the clouds and the bottoms were in shadow, whereas before the sun had been beneath them shining it's light up into the floor of them coloring them with sunrise.  Ha, these were the same clouds, just in a different position in relation to the sun.

I must admit to feeling a little sheepish about this realization.  Did everyone else already know this?  How is it that I'd never thought of this in all the years that I'd been watching clouds?  Ah well, now I know.  

A couple more.....

**** The click-clattering of the ice-beaded branches of the bushes as I brush past them in the early morning taking Rosie out to her yard.

****Rosie lies waiting outside our door for me to get up in the morning. She used to sleep in our room with us but her restlessness makes the chance of a good night sleep impossible.  When I get up in the morning and open the door, her wagging tail always goes "thump, thump, thump" on the hardwood floor.  At the same time Fig is rustling about and his bell and name tag are jangling.  It's like a welcoming party every morning, the sound of our animals greeting me when I open the door.