Saturday, July 20, 2013

A walk

Being lonely, broke and bored, and today being Saturday, and being in need of drain cleaner, I took myself on a long walk to not one but two malls. It was clear, finally, after a week of rain, and the clouds in the blue sky were spectacular. I like clouds. I like them at home, I like them in Luang Prabang where they form great vertical eruptions, but here they are something else. In LP the sky is cut in every direction by mountains; at home it is interrupted by buildings or trees, but here it just goes on and on and on and the clouds spread across it, unspooling in thin, horizontal stretches or piling up like one paused explosion after another, with distinct foregrounds and middle grounds and backgrounds and internal shadows and shadings of purple and gray amid the bone white edges. It's like a huge, complicated cloud landscape, and it takes up as much of the area one's eye takes in as the land does. Maybe more. And the sky feels co close at hand--it must be a trick of the distance--it's like the clouds are going about their business just at the height of all the not-very-tall buildings, like cloud wildlife among us. And as this city seems to have no wildlife beyond pigeons and magpies, the idea of having a bunch of sentient clouds hanging around just out of reach is very welcome.











Oh. Today I also noticed the wildflowers. Two-and-a-half foot dandelions. Huge dandelion puffballs. Something that might be wild thyme. Iridescent blue chicory. Woody, tightly petaled things, mostly low to the ground, mostly muted. Lovely.

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