September is the best month for cloud-watching. The constant blue of summer gives way to changeable vistas overhead. The sky is filled with massive white sculptures.
When I gaze toward them on warm afternoons, I smile as if seeing an old friend.
Finding shapes in the clouds is not as fun all alone. It is more exciting to share your discoveries with someone else.
When I was a girl, Mom and I would lie on the spiky, late-summer grass and imagine another world in the billows overhead. We’d plop down like exhausted travelers, taking a break from the everydayness of school and housework.
Now was the time to leave the kaleidoscope of our colorful world and find ordinary shapes in extraordinary shades of white and gray.
At first, the clouds were just clouds. But in moments, our eyes stretched to understand the possibilities of whimsy.
In moments, I saw something.
"Look! Do you see it? There!"
I poked toward the sky and nudged her shoulder. Then, I glanced at her face, watching as her eyes scanned the sky to find the right clump of white.
"It’s a pig. See it?”
She saw it. She always saw what I saw. Even when she probably didn’t.
And I did the same for her.
Animals were the easiest to see, because the clouds loved to stretch to include legs and snouts and ears. The gray edges of each billow gave our pig or puppy the possibility of depth; we trailed our fingers along as our creation lumbered past.
The wind was impatient with us; it shoved an elephant trunk upward and away in lazy seconds. We instantly wondered how we could have seen what we saw. But the parade continued, and other shapes joined the menagerie.
Sailing ships. Chicken drumsticks. Sea monkeys. Figures whose legs kicked toward tiny soccer balls of fluff. There was an alternate world of improbable, fanciful life of our own design, right there above our heads.
The best clouds for watching were the huge, thick blobs that looked big enough to cover our house like a quilt. We stared into the middle of each one, wondering what could be hiding within the folds and wrinkles there.
If we could flap our arms like angels and float up to it, could we climb inside and wriggle around, pushing so far in that only our toes would be sticking out in the air?
It would feel like heaven, we decided.
In a handful of seconds, a beaver with a flat-paddle tail morphed into a crab. Its craggy legs disintegrated as it floated past, becoming a shape that challenged my imagination to name.
The wispy clouds of changing weather in the months ahead were less exciting than the ones of those September, cloud-watching days. The stripes and dotted patterns forced us to think of less obvious shapes, and their fragility reminded us that, while autumn was still with us, winter was coming.
There would be clouds in winter. They would hover ominously, shards of sun-blocking slashes, pregnant with precipitation.
But those clouds, while bold in their icy austerity, didn't inspire the wonder of the fat pillow-clouds of September.
I grew older and seldom lie on the grass, looking upward. Mom isn't here to watch the clouds with me now. But I often sit, awestruck, beneath a sky filled with blues (just enough blue for a Dutchman’s breeches, she always said) and decorated with clouds.
I look for her, inside the wispy, hollow spaces within the biggest clouds, and hope to see her there—toes wiggling my way.
