The temperature is gasping toward the 100 degree mark even in our somewhat temperate area, but two-three days ago it was nice enough to eat lunch on the patio in our backyard. I had gone into the house for something and when I came back, Dean was not at the table.
“Have you taken time to look at the clouds lately?” he asked. “No,” I replied, since it seemed a little bit like watching paint dry. I looked over to my right to see him lying on his back in the shade of the house. Patting the grass beside him, he said, “C’mon, lie down and look at the clouds.”
I gingerly lowered my creaky bones and at first the cool, green grass felt right-down cushy. However, as I started to sort of nestle in, I began to feel hard root stems and the bumpy surface of the ground. As I dutifully looked up, Dean asked me, “Do you see that face with the open mouth?” My answer was short and to the point. “No.”
Unfortunately, my mind had fled to five years earlier when we were camped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in order to attend my nephew’s wedding at Havasu Falls the next morning. Our air mattress had sprung a leak and we “slept” on the ground that night after walking 12 miles to get to the campsite. Not a pleasant experience for an old lady.
That same feeling was now transmitting itself to my back from a five-year-old memory and it totally obscured a special moment with my husband and some fun with visual imagination. I was soon creaking upright, impatient to be back at whatever work was at hand at the moment. The only thing positive that I received from the cloud-watching experience was the sound of my vertebrae aligning themselves--correctly, I hope.
Lesson to self: Take time to smell the flowers, or in this case, gaze at the clouds.
