I live in an environment where the shape of clouds are always a varied affair of elegant evening skirts billowed across a dance of blue sky and black angry tuxedos swelling in a crescendo. The soft fluffy puff of the poodle speaks of warm soft winds and sigh and a whisper knowing that the winds can blow in the eerie funnel shaped clouds that speak of a fury of wind and hail and tornados in the heat and aftermath of a cloudless sky of hot uncomfortable heat.
The clouds of last season’s early spring were a low pressure affair of white that filled the sky like oppressive tulle and matched the snow that fell in thick wet clumps, the snow that no longer dots the greening landscape but judging from the lack of soft dots of cotton set against the palest shades of blue, it will fall cascading like a waterfall before the day is through.
I enjoy the high up flavor of grey streaks high up in the sky that speak of thunder and flashes of lightning as the moon lifts up and kisses the night. I enjoy the lazy days of rocking in my hammock staring up past the tree tops to the ever changing shapes that whisper and dance across sunlit streaks of laughter and conjure up lost stories of childhood dreams and are their own meditation on days where watermelon cubes live beside the wild mint that tangles next to the strawberry vines and I watch and sip the honey sweet air of the bee buzz.
Then there are the winter days where the clouds are spread so thin stretched out from horizon to horizon, a white spider web on top of a white spider web on top of a snowflake over and over again so that the only bit of blue I can see is in a memory of another day. The white of the sky meets the white of the snow topped ground and the white frosted trees stretch up the thick trunks and overturned roots disappear into the white fog that lifts up across the white encased ice of the river and it presses down and makes me drowsy and it blinds and stings in its sterility even as it sparkles and dances across my gaze when a glint of sun sneaks through.
And the cloudless nights that allow the blanket of stars to shine so bright it makes me gasp as northern lights sing across the prairies and forests dancing even above the city lights only slightly dulled as the green fire of the sky crackles and my heart reaches upwards finding the pull too irresistible to ignore and I am lost in the beauty never ever taking it for granted.
My house is brightly coloured, chartreuse green on the trim always there to remind me of warmer days, of now, reminding me that colour is eminent and the clouds will shift and turn and become something else another day. The walls of my house are set against 70 year old maple floors and the orange hue of fir trim and I carefully licked on the colours of life onto those old plaster walls. A green plum which in most lights is the deep yellow of the sun and a pale blue called PEI sky and that carefully matched tiffany blue and various shades of green and a bright lemon fresh yellow and then there is the crush sip of an orange soda covering the floors and matching the soft blues of my basement. What does this have to do with clouds, everything I say, because quite by accident, all my accents are the white shade of the most perfect summer billowing cloud as curtains dance and bedsheets wrap and sofas embrace.
And at work, I stare out my window in bits and pieces all day long and watch the clouds tell me what is coming, what has already come and what is here right now, in this moment. And as much as I feel deeply rooted to the earth, there is a part of me that lives by the sky, by the shape of the clouds that drift across my vision telling me the stories of my soul.