Dear Reader:

Two hours after I took this photo last Saturday the dark clouds moved in, the thunder boomed, and the lightning started flashing…I was not only “walking on clouds” in my euphoria over finally getting some desperately needed rain for the yards and garden… but I was actually on a specific cloud...”Cloud Nine!” 🙂

*Mandy…I started thinking about this “idiom” and since Eva Cate just turned nine…that would have been a fun “idiom” too… with lots of colorful number nine’s all over her t-shirt and cotton puffs intertwined. 🙂

Even though science wasn’t my favorite subject I do remember, as a child, loving our unit of study on clouds…the different kinds. I remember we even got to each tell the class about an animal we saw in our imagination and what clouds made up the parts….a lot of students saw giraffes with a lot of stratus clouds in the long legs and necks. Pigs had more round,puffy cumulus clouds and so on…but that lesson has stayed with me.

I read some research article on why man could never “walk on a cloud” but it was way too technical to be any fun….let’s just say that overall realistically walking on a cloud would be a damp, perhaps dark, windy, or even icy experience. Yet, we can always bounce and walk on clouds in our imagination…or even  start “walking on sunshine.” 

In literature, especially poetry, many of the major players/poets all loved clouds too…in different ways…

Shelly told us in “The Cloud” that clouds “bring fresh showers for thirsty flowers” …(now that’s what I’m talking about Shelly!)

Wordsworth, however, “Wandered lonely as a cloud.” (Come on William …put a smile on your face!)

The Greek playwright Aristophanes called the celestial clouds “patron goddesses that bring us intelligence, dialect, and reason.” (A good reason, it appears to me, to pay attention to clouds.)

One of the nicest ways to feel like we are ‘floating in the clouds’ is to receive a thank you or a note of gratitude for something one did consciously or not….just being reminded that all kind deeds do not go unnoticed.

Kim Ode, in an article titled “Giving Thanks” uses the metaphor of walking on clouds with gratitude.

” Being on the receiving end of someone’s thanks has us walking on those particularly puffy clouds that fill bright spring days.

The crazy thing about being thankful is that it’s the shortest distance between feeling okay and feeling great. The sensation doesn’t light up the sky, but is more one of quiet satisfaction. We actually feel a little lighter for having breathed deep and clambered high towards the clouds when we remember to send someone else a note of thanks, an email, text, or call…it doesn’t even matter what we say, but what prompts us. It’s not the feat, but the humility.

So until tomorrow...“Dear Father….Thank you for the rain today (Saturday) that made the birds sing while they bathed in puddles, the flowers turn their faces upward towards You in gratitude and me, a ‘wanna be’ gardener … happy… to see her plants watered and their thirst quenched. ”

(“Silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.” Gertrude Stein)

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

My dwarf morning glories “Blue My Mind” love the hot weather and the patio…while my grass has another bloom…it is actually a pale yellow and beautiful.