CLOUDS

Clouds can be so pretty and songful and worthy of guessing games – but not these clouds. These clouds are like a blanket of white grey from horizon to horizon- the colour of snow – a lid that is closed, ephemeral and full of gloom.

Interesting that this kind of rainy, snowy, inclement weather is called a depression and if the weather is like this for too long it makes us feel depressed. But they don’t call a wave of warm settled weather an up-ression ( although it does lift our spirits) they call it an anti-cyclone as opposed to a cyclone that can blow your house away and curls clockwise or counter clockwise depending on your hemisphere. So who claimed the word: depression, first. The studiers of the weather or the studiers of the mind? (As usual we will not consult Aunty Google. My questions are only ever for mulling over. I can google it too but sometimes it takes all the fun out of a conversation).

These clouds make me want to eat.

I would like to go to space simply to look down and study the weather and watch the sky from within it.

See that pile of branches – that is the edge of a huge pile of branches that the ice storm brought down. The first thing I see every morning now. Piled up in the front yard. So sad.

I am sure I have told you of my dream to have a huge world map on my wall, that is as big as the wall – it would be a massive screen showing the weather drifting or surging across the world with no borders, dotted with tiny unobtrusive notations on temperature and wind speed and precipitation. It would be topographical. Wherever my curser landed a little box of notes would report exactly what was going on. No entertaining speech, no histrionics, no predictions, no interpretation or experts or victims, just that moment. Soundless and true. All adjectives banished. All spoken words gone. Just the facts of that place and that moment in that tiny box and the swirl of the clouds and wind drifting around border less world. Imagine that. How inclusive it would feel. I could see at a glance the temperature and conditions at your place. The heat above cities and silent sandstorms in the desert and winds across the sea. And when I am not in the room the weather quietly moves about unwatched because the screen would never be off. I wish I were clever enough to create this wall of world weather. I think it would be a life’s work to create.

I do love my job at the mill – I think I have helped literally hundreds of people learn how to bake by now – but I miss the weather. I miss the sky. We have two tiny windows way up high in the warehouse that houses the mills and I must look up to them a thousand times a day. You can only see a patch of sky but it is enough.

I wish for you moments of joy today. Joy is so singular and not as rare as we think. But we have to be open to it. We have to feel it and note it. Otherwise our moments of joy rush past too fast and are easily forgotten under the ominous heavy lid of thickening cloud.

I hope you are all well today.

Celi