Today’s Delight? Clouds!

What I learned to appreciate when I looked up.

I was standing in line at an amusement park in Ohio, a state I have visited frequently but do not live in, when I looked up. It’s easy to look up at an amusement park: the coasters there are tall and the paths seem to angle upwards towards them, framing the glorious hunks of metal on which we pay to be flung across at high speeds. But this isn’t about roller coasters, though I’m sure the park I was at wishes it was. No, I was looking past the cars, past metal tracks, up and up at the sky.

This sky in particular was full of bright and puffy clouds, the kind you might see in a greeting card or on a kids’ drawing. They’re thick enough to shadow the ground when they pass in front of the sun, and they fold over themselves like cotton candy, even if that simile is overused. I find them to be the semantic prototype of a cloud, the cloudiest cloud, if you will.

And so, I commented to the kid standing next to me. “These clouds are great!”

He looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was.

I’m from California, where clouds are most often tiny, high-strung cirrus clouds, which look like threads that have been forgotten by some larger sky blanket. They’re pathetic little clouds, and though I love them in their own ways, they have nothing on fluffy clouds.

I spent the few days I stayed in Ohio looking up and being delighted. The weather was perfect: day after day of those puffy little clouds against the wide blue backdrop of the sky. It framed them perfectly, those abstract artworks, those sculptures of wind and water made far better than their individual parts.

And then it was time to return home and bid the clouds adieu for now. But as it rose off the tarmac and headed into the Western skies, the very clouds I had been gushing about all week guided us up. We flew alongside them, and up close the contours of their shape seemed to defy gravity, twisting up and jutting off into the empty air around them. They were so big they shadowed themselves, so thick they obscured the vision from my window seat, and so lovely that they made it hard to say goodbye, but easy to think of fondly, even as they faded away into flatness somewhere over the midwest.

This mini-essay was inspired by Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, an excellent collection of essays on delight which you should absolutely read.