Today two storms raged through.
The first hit early this morning while I was cycling back into town with my neighbor. We'd been watching the dark horizon for a good hour, and then suddenly the lightening was overhead and the rain was crashing down and we were totally enveloped. I knew we were inviting danger but I laughed the whole time. We pulled over once we got back into town and waited it out under the awning of a store displaying frilly pink costume dresses for little girls in its windows. We were soaked to the core and were stiff and cold when we got back on our bikes to ride the last several miles to our doors.
The second storm came just after Yellow and Papa Joe and I arrived at the optometrist's office for Papa Joe's appointment. Yellow and I were working on a crossword and I asked her to give me a seven-letter word for "not kosher."
"Look at the rain," she said.
When it was time to head back to the car, we hung back in the doorway. The rain had subsided a bit after the initial downpour, but now it was getting heavier again.
"We'd better wait," said Yellow.
"Can we make it?" asked Papa Joe.
"There's an umbrella in the trunk," I said, "I'll run get it."
"Oh, no," said Yellow, "it's raining too hard."
"Maybe we should sit down and wait ten minutes," said Papa Joe.
"I can get it," I said, "it's not far."
"No, no," said Yellow, "you'll get wet."
"Am I a chauffer or am I a coward?" I roared into the wind as I bolted from the awning toward the car, pressing the open-trunk button on the keychain as I ran. The trunk popped open and I thrust in my hand, blindly seized the golden handle without even a glance, pivoted on my toes, and sprinted back toward the building as I unfurled the umbrella above me--a wind-whipped standard of classic yellow and white pie wedges, like something out of a beach scene.
I put my arm around Yellow's waist and held the umbrella over her head as I led her to her seat. The rain was torrential! Papa Joe braved the water next, clutching his bag of complementary eyedrops to his chest. Finally we all three were safe in the car, gasping and sputtering.
"I've been rained on again," I said, "I'm wet. It's the second time today."
"We'd better wait to go," said Yellow, "until it eases off a little."
********
After dinner we took our walk. The storm had brought a large limb down from our neighbor's tree. "That branch used to brush our heads," said Yellow. The Tulip Poplar leaves all down the street were frozen sideways, as if stubbornly determined to point out the direction the rude wind had blustered off in. The Petunias echoed the leaves, each tiny face turned down pathetically in the same direction, away from the storm's onslaught. I thought of herds of horses in the rain, when they all turn their tails to the wind and bow their heads.
Once Yellow and Papa Joe had settled back into their lawn chairs, I took my second round. Traveling up the block in back I found a sodden birdnest collapsing on the sidewalk beneath a tree. I gathered it and settled it up against the edge of the grass. Just beyond I found fragments of bright blue eggshell, and the greater part of an egg, washed perfectly clean by the heavy rains. I put the shell back into the nest and continued on.
The sky was incomprehensible. I passed a woman with a dog and I said "look how strange the sky is." She turned to look behind her, where I was looking, and said "oh, yes, it's beautiful."
I kept watching the sky and I began to dawn upon the realization that it was verbally indescribable. What could I say? That it was "cherubim?" That it was "layered?" That I saw "pink spires?" That I didn't understand what it was telling me?
Several years ago I read an old book called "Finding Your Way on Land or Sea." I think I found this book on a shelf in the train station. One thing the book described was reflections the sea and landmasses cast in the sky, and how you can read reflections in the sky when you are out at sea. This idea changed my perception of the sky. Even though I cannot read a sky, I know that some people can, and even more people probably could a long time ago, when they paid closer attention to such things. I imagine there is a kind of sky language, written in moisture and colors, and it can be read, perhaps, the way one might read animal tracks or ocean waves, seeing trails and signs and possibly predicting what will follow.
I think I don't know the sky well. Maybe I move too much--it is so different in different places. And I think I know why I can't describe it. I can describe an ocean because I've been in one. I've seen it. I've touched it. I've smelled it. I've tasted it. I've heard it. I haven't spent my life next to it, but I've been immersed in it for very short periods of time. And so I have lists of concrete words waiting for me to cast into it from the shore: gray, foamy, rolling, clear, loud, cold.
But the sky... I've spent so much more time with the sky than the sea, really -- I see it every day. Perhaps I could even go so far as to claim it's the only constant sight in my life and even the lives of my ancestors. What else accompanies us day and night? Trees fall down and rot, rivers change course, landscapes change. Mountains may seem constant during our lives, but even they are something we can walk away from: we cannot walk away from the sky, it's with us day and night.
I can't go into the sky. I can fly in an airplane, but I can't fly into it myself. I think if I flew into it, it would recede anyway, like mist. Sky is something we look through, rather than at, I think, anyway. Perhaps we look at clouds, because they stop our eyes from looking beyond them--they are so dense with water.
The sky might come down to us, on occasion, on those autumn mornings we wake up and find ourselves in a wet, white cloud. And on summer evenings when the mist layers a foot off the surface of the fields. It comes down to us when we're floating on our backs in the water or lying out in the grass in a wide open field. We can climb mountains and go into the sky that way, I think, or at least come nearer to it.
But for the most part, it's untouchable. Strange, that it's so distant, when it's always with us. The sky remains; it's inevitable. The sun rises each day; it's inevitable. The stars show up each night; it's inevitable.
