From my archives —

I love mornings like today. No plans, no agenda. I’m free to sit and enjoy the birds and the sky scape out the nine lady den windows, sitting happily and warmly under my pink cardinal blanket, Penelope curled up asleep in my lap. The wind is playing a symphony on the wind chimes and the bamboo are swaying to the music. I see two cardinals and a goldfinch on the feeders out the windows. Have my bagel and fruit on a snowman plate…today is almost perfect.

Dark grayish clouds, shaded in blues and purples are spitting rain and floating fast across the sky canvas. The rain clouds part and a beautiful window opens up to reveal a turquoise sky, white clouds blushed on their crowns with shimmering bright white sun as if Mother Nature is kissing the heads of a new grandchild in her children’s arms. Now the wind has blown the rain maker clouds away and as Pablo Neruda says, “The clouds travel like white handkerchiefs of goodbye, the wind, traveling, waving them in its hands.” Makes me remember Chief’s handkerchiefs and our children’s cloth diapers blowing in the wind on the clothesline.

I loved hanging clothes on the clothesline line on a bright sunny day. Once I hung the clothes out after I finished reading The Fox by DH Lawrence and a small fox walked out of the woods and watched me while I pinned the clothes to the lines. Always wondered if it was a metaphorical fox. Made for interesting conversation for me and Chief around the dinner table that night.

I am obsessed with the clouds today, so handsome in their myriad of colors. I’ve searched for the perfect color words to describe them. The clouds are layered in smokey gray, twilight blue-purple, milky white, and sterling silver, swimming swiftly through the windy sky. When the clouds break apart while I’m walking Penelope, I see small fluffy pink flamingo hued clouds floating in the distance outlined by the sun’s rays, colored by Mother Nature’s watercolors behind a veil of clouds, little surprises for my eyes in a wintry dark sky.

I always think the clouds come by to block the sunlight but this quote gave me a different perspective. “Sometimes the clouds in the sky are mistaken. They didn’t come to block the sunlight. They came to embrace it,” Kaylee Stepkoski. This is the way I thought about the sky today. The clouds were embracing the sun. When the sun broke through the thick clouds she touched the crowns of the clouds, kissed them with her warmth. Some clouds she held in her hands and outlined their shapes in a luminous light. The clouds just glowed where she touched them.

Maybe those pink clouds were baby souls traveling to the family they are to be born into. If we compare ourselves to clouds, I think I’m a fluffy fat sterling silver cloud floating slowly toward heaven, still low enough in the sky to fly with the songbirds. The twilight-purple clouds are folks close to heaven getting ready to be united with loved ones at the gates of heaven. Their clouds glowing with God’s love as he draws them close. Maybe the dark grayish clouds are teenagers, learning how to navigate the landscape when life is hard to navigate, occasionally kissed by the sun to warm their teenage angst.

And those beautiful rounded white fluffy clouds, bleached white by the sun, floating individually in an azure blue sky, are folks having an extra ordinary day full of love and kindness, feeling all is right in their world, floating on a sky of God’s love. “There’s a bright spot in every dark cloud,” Bruce Beresford. That bright spot in the darkness is God, his light and his love.

“A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed… It feels an impulsion… this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.” — Richard Bach