I've looked at clouds...

When our daughter was a baby I liked to get outside for a walk with her. It took some serious weather to keep us in the house. She was a sturdy little Mainah, but did I expose her to a driving spring rain, a sapping August humidity, a raw November wind, or a sleet slicked sidewalk? Hail no! We had plenty of books, music, toys, and by the time she was three, plenty of dog, in the benign, glossy furred Tyler, a black lab puppy she found and liberated from a yard sale in Vasselboro, Maine.

If I wanted to go downtown or down street as we often say here in the Pine Tree state, I had four street choices, all downhill. The journey back from market, post office, library, bakery, or stores with my girl child in a snuggly, baby carrier, or stroller, was better for post pregnancy toning than a gym membership. My posture and my outlook, and this may be a dysfunction or refiltering of memory, were drawn skyward in those first years of the 1990s.

Several decades earlier, Judy Collins received critical and popular esteem for her 1967 album "Wildflower". Here is a stanza from her single "Both Sides Now" written by a precocious Joni Mitchell.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down and still somehow

It's clouds illusions I recall

I really don't now clouds at all

Joni's achingly ambivalent lyrics about clouds, love and life compress keenly observed human markers such as friendship, love, and heartbreak into a compact paean to the tender gifts that are, should we be so blessed, stark humility and its companion, battered maturity. My thoughts and reflections as I gaze upward at 53 are more attuned to life's intrinsic fluidity and fluctuation than at 33 when the fresh air, sun, and a neighborly hello were a simple tonic and welcome prelude to lunch and the baby's nap.

In late October when our daughter was about six months old, I dressed her for the bracing weather, secured her in our sturdy L.L. Bean baby carrier, and executed the necessary contortions to strap her on my back. We then walked down the steep hill that would take us to the local Renys, an eclectic Maine department store. I was searching for and found eight goblets for a 35th wedding anniversary dinner we were hosting that night for my parents. The day was a fall glory: crisp breeze, a Winslow Homer light, the cotton ball cumulus clouds of a child's crayoned drawing.

The invigorating fall air was an auspicious appetizer to an evening where reality exceeded expectation. We were seven around the dining room table including our dear practice baby, our four year old niece M.. She was the porcelain complected epitome of an English rose, but exhibited the sturdy sensibilities of a "skidduh drivuh", which is how she reveled in describing her father. The eighth diner was buzzing the floorway in a newly acquired walker. My sister, the youngest of three , called from North Carolina to join and complete our celebration.

Just as a figure in a museum's bas-relief sculpture projects slightly outward and focuses your gaze, I remember the sky that day and many other days, as a benevolent witness and cogent factor to my sense of well-being. There was no prosaic notion that fair weather boded good days or that inclement weather determined bad days. The sky's conditions, calm or storm, were a soothing counterpoint and companion to my days, just as I am comforted both by the steady tick tock and the shrill cuckoo of the beautiful German time piece on our dining room wall.

I kept journals in those days ostensibly for her to read for details of her infancy and childhood. Although she can one day peruse the gamut from animals, apple picking, and aunties to zodiacs, zoos and zwiebacks, what she may truly glean is an unstinting, uncensored, unabashed glimpse into the hopeful heart of a young mother who thinks if she tries hard enough she can make the world, her corner of it, safer for a beloved daughter.

I still revel in the beauty and changeability of a Maine day, but as I sip my morning coffee my thoughts will turn to Boston, Massachusetts. Did she take an umbrella? Will the D line get her to Chestnut Hill on time? It's so hot..it's so cold. And then there are the larger issues. She's working late...she has evening dance rehearsal; let the bus, let the shuttle be on time, Lord. I can't see her portion of the sky, but her neighborhood's weather report is programmed like a talisman, into my computer.

We were ten years married and in our early thirties when we became parents. Certainly we had known loss: the deaths of a father and three out of five grandparents; a jolting move, a faded friendship or faltering finances were personal to us, but certainly familiar human burdens. Hope, which we carried causally then, as one would an old sweater, unremarkable until you misplace it, must have texture and layers, rather like the soil in my shade garden. The dirt seems so rich as it's overturned, but becomes clay like, and then gives ways to an intricate web of roots. Over the years of trial and error the sturdy survivors are monkshood, bachelor buttons, peonies, bleeding hearts, thistle, day lilies, and hosta.

We have known times when our plans and dreams took root with the determined turning of the topsoil of our efforts. The stubborn, gray clay days taught us patience, perseverance and perspective. When we couldn't snip, cut, or hack through the twisted roots, we broke and crumbled the sod of our need and pressed down through and around. Hope has muscle.

To paraphrase scripture, the substance of what we hope for and the evidence of what is unseen is faith. Simply stated, clouds then as now give me hope...and build my faith...which always fosters love. I know that planes fly into buildings on perfect September mornings when the sky is an ironed blue sheet; but I know that heroes rise in an intake of breath. I know an angel can drop from the sky in the form of an endearing Russian exchange student. She can arrive on a dreary April day when the pieces of your heart are as scattered as a tossed puzzle, and fly away home on a clear June morning with your heart fitted tightly back together; even as she takes a portion, across an ocean and distant borders, forever with her.

How is that possible? It's good to make peace early with a formidable truth young Joni grasped and captured in verse.

"But something's lost but

something's gained in living

everyday

The thin sweater is lost to the moths of time: experiences both hurtful or fruitful or one in the same. I wear my hope now...clasped and fastened, the dented armor of a life's soldier who has survived, and learned that struggle winnows, and what we glean feeds us. Joni's refrain as she reflects in vivid word pictures on clouds, love, and life is that she doesn't really know them-clouds, love and life-at all.

I give full honor and respect to her artistic genius. My truth is different. The deeply rooted survivors in my garden of the last twenty years are the hardy species that were planted, watered and weeded from my earliest days: family, loyalty, friendship, grit, circumspection, work, empathy, faith, and always...always this...protect the children. Weeding is dirty work. A frost or winter kill will sometimes mock your efforts. My life garden is smaller, but truer in the clarity of its variegated hues. I can rest awhile in quiet and hear the birdsong...under the cleansing, expansive, forgiving sky.