The weather, they said, was delightful. On a Monday it was sunny, with skies so blue it was difficult, after some time of gazing, to imagine what they might look like in any different shade. On Tuesday, the sun was bright, so bright that people wondered if something had gone wrong. Should it be this bright? On Wednesday, the sky was blue and the sun was bright, which was what they expected. Thursday the same and on Friday, somehow things were bluer and brighter.
The next week was the same, and the week that followed. They say that out there it’s like that, just sunny and blue, or blue and sunny. In the winter it snows, but it snows only at night, so that the blue skies aren’t interrupted. Children grow to be quite old before they learn what clouds are, and even then they’re uncertain what Cloud Cover means. Cloudy skies are for storybooks and movie screens, not for their out of doors. In the winter it is blue and in the summer it is blue. It’s blue in the spring and blue in the fall, and no one wonders anymore why, they just know it is.
I see this sky today and I see it blue. I see the sun that’s bright and full. I see the water that’s painted with the same brush as the sky, the only thing separating one from the other being a tenuous line of deep green trees. Sometimes, I see a cloud float by. For a while there are many, then few, then, later into the afternoon when the evening sets in, I see none at all. The sun fades away, slowly, teasingly, and we go to bed in the dark unsure of what the next day will bring.
Will it be sunny and blue? Will the clouds puff and dot the sky, or will the build and twist and darken? Will there be wind today, or will the lake rest again, for what might be the third day, or the fourth day in a row? It couldn’t be the fifth day, because even children know the wind here cannot rest for that long. Will the sun return, to warm my skin and to dry my lawn, or will the next morning bring with it those clouds, thin and high, whitewashing the sky and paling the water to silver?
I do not know what it will do, which is why today I must savor what it is doing. These skies are blue now, but they won’t be forever. Forever might be a few days, or it might be just the morning hours, or it might be, as I see sometimes, an hour in the morning followed by an interval in the evening, and solid clouds in between. On these days when the sun shines and the sky stuns blue, I know I need to pay attention.
They say that we should move to where the skies are always blue, and the sun always bright. They say it’s better there. They say that it’s too cloudy here, or too cold, or the summer is too short and too hot, but sometimes too cold and too wet. They say that this place isn’t as good as that place. I say they’re wrong. I want to live where the right days aren’t something I count on. I want to live without expecting, and when I see a blue sky and a bright sun I want to drop the cloudy day things and rush do something that matters, to do something that I cannot do when the blues are gray and the sun has lost its way. Without so many clouds, these days couldn’t mean so much.