I’m drinking my coffee in the lady den this morning watching the bamboo sway in time with wind chime symphonies and morning songbird prayers. I love mornings like today no plans, no agenda then I realize I’m having 43 folks over for our family Christmas dinner on Saturday night. I’ve set places for 32 and I’ll wait til later in the week to set places for the children in the kitchen. I love decorating the tables and setting places with my Christmas china.

Vet brother made a house call Sunday afternoon. Penelope woke up a goose on Saturday with that terrible cough that sounds like a migrating flock of Canadian geese. My friend and I went to town Friday and left the dogs at home and I think they found some Christmas candy. I’m sure Penelope was the instigator but one Hershey kiss, tin foil and all, makes her sick. I put all the candy on top of the piano knowing she could not get up there. Maybe she got in the trash and licked a few wrappers. Vet brother brought pills and an antibiotic and her geese cough has migrated south. She’s right as rain and frisky on her walks in the cold air this morning.

The sky was beautiful today, a window opened up to reveal an ocean of turquoise sky. The white clouds were blushed on their crowns with shimmering bright white sun as if Mother Nature was kissing the head of a new grandchild resting 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 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 late afternoon, I see small fluffy pink flamingo hued clouds floating far off 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, occasionally kissed by the sun to warm their teenage angst, learning how to navigate the landscape when life’s journey is tough.

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.

Psalm 104:3: “He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.”