CLOUD DAYS
Cloud Days
I have a name for certain days.
Cloud days.
Not gray days. Those are something else entirely. Cloud days are blue-sky days with enormous white clouds—the kind that seem to have actual weight to them. They pile up along the horizon in great white masses, one behind another, until they look almost like mountains in the distance.
I've always loved them.
Sometimes, when I'm driving through the countryside, I'll pretend they really are mountains.
If you don't look too carefully, it works.
For a few seconds, the familiar fields and roads become somewhere completely different. Somewhere farther west, perhaps, or someplace I've never been. The clouds become a mountain range and suddenly the same road I've driven a hundred times feels like it's leading somewhere new.
I realize this is probably a slightly ridiculous thing for a grown woman to do.
I do it anyway.
Cloud days make me want to go somewhere. I find excuses to take the long way home. I bring my camera. Places I normally drive past without giving them much thought become worth stopping for because there they are—the clouds—towering behind an old barn or hanging over a field.
They make everything look more cinematic.
And they make me feel very small.
I like that feeling more than I used to.
There is something comforting about looking up and realizing just how much sky there is above you. Whatever has been occupying your thoughts all morning suddenly has to compete with something several miles high.
Sometimes I still look for shapes in them, too.
That feels like something we're supposed to grow out of, along with lying in the grass and deciding that one is clearly a rabbit and another is absolutely a ship.
But I'm not sure why.
Maybe adulthood has enough things we're required to take seriously.
Surely we can keep the clouds.
So when I wake up and see blue between great heaps of white outside the window, I still get a little excited.
It's a cloud day.
And if I have anywhere at all to go, I'll probably take my camera.
There might be mountains.