Clouds

One of the things I like about this time of year is clouds. They’re up there in July and August, of course, but I don’t seem to notice them like I do in the fall. Maybe that’s because I can get preoccupied with looking at the sand for sea glass, at knee-level for flowers and waist-level for small children, into my lap while reading a book, into the fridge for a snack, and at eye level for human interaction. It’s not until the cooler weather comes around that I remember to regularly look skyward.

As a child, I spent a lot of time outdoors. This was many years ago, when kids were largely unsupervised and allowed to get bored. After rock-jumping in the brook next to my house, bombing around the neighborhood on bikes, and unsuccessfully trying to talk someone’s mother into letting us watch TV, my friends and I would collapse on one of our front lawns – preferably in the shade of a leafed-out maple – and gaze at the blue sky and white clouds. It was an intermission, of sorts, between activities, this cloud watching. I’ve lost track of all the shapes I saw back then, but I know there were schools of fish, baseball caps and T-shirts, diamond-shaped kites, furry rabbits, and happy faces– all the usual shapes kids see.

When I first went on a plane as a child, I remember wanting the window seat, so I could look out at the clouds. I was surprised that we could fly through them – that they weren’t solid or made of a cotton-like substance. The fluffy clouds I was familiar with would re-emerge when the plane was above them, along with the knowledge that if I happened to fall out of the plane, I would land on the bed of clouds below, where I would await the imminent arrival of a rescue team in comfort.

Somewhere along the way, looking at clouds became its own pastime. We visit a cottage on a lake in Ontario every summer. The clouds there are often flat and gray on the bottom and puffy and white on top. I’ve come to know they’re cumulus clouds and signal fair weather. No matter where I see them, I call them Koshlong clouds, in honor of that Ontario lake and the sense of well-being I have there.

At home, I’m up and out in the morning, checking out the sky as soon as I clear the end of the driveway. At dawn, the clouds are more colorful – pink and orange and white and purple and yellow. And because I often walk along the Mystic River, the reflection of the clouds on the water gives me a double dose of cloud-viewing pleasure.

The pleasure I get from looking at clouds has something to do with how accessible they are, even from a great distance. They’re not like a mountain or a forest on the horizon – things we can climb up and down – but they give me that same feeling of wonder and calm in the middle of my chest. What the mountain and forest and clouds do have in common is their largeness, their power, and their ability to stop time, if only for the moment it takes us to notice their magnificence.

I have a lot of photos of clouds on my phone. Here are a select few:

Recommendation: Look up!