Watching

We have a house guest, so I cannot go into the guest bedroom as usual to sit and cogitate and scheme. Instead, I must sit here in what I call the sky room, the room with monstrous windows that, when the sun is high in the sky, is impossibly hot. But at this time of morning, with the windows open, this room is cool. The huge windows allow me to pretend I am outside. My vista is magnificent. I see an enormous swath of blue and grey clouds in front of me, the winds aloft ripping them into ribbons and tearing them into sheets as they scurry from right to left. And in the distance, a massive horizontal rupture in the thick clouds reveals a beige gash, tinged with pink; it’s the sky colorized by the sun. That window in the clouds is littered with black and pink fragments of the cloud bank that once covered it. All of this drama I watch unfold before me takes place within a window of the sky framed by trees that, in this early morning light, look black and fragile as their leaves wither and fall. In the distance, I see the reflection of light on a small lake south of the Village against a backdrop of smoky hills. Looking upward again, I see the rupture in the clouds has grown huge, revealing a stretch of sky in which the clouds look like thin grey bands of round stones in a creek bed. If I could bottle mornings like this, I could put pharmaceutical companies that sell blood pressure medications out of business. But I can’t bottle these times and I can’t even begin to adequately describe them. So I’ll stop trying. Experiences are too precious and too fragile for words.